


roll the dice

by polyxena_chatoyant



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Majo no Takkyuubin | Kiki's Delivery Service, Naruto, Ouran High School Host Club - All Media Types, The Magicians (TV), The Magicians - Lev Grossman, Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Recreational Drug Use, Self-Insert, pretty self-indulgent not gonna lie
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-19
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2018-09-18 12:34:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 36,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9385421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polyxena_chatoyant/pseuds/polyxena_chatoyant
Summary: title subject to change. where i put the things i know i'm not gonna finish (probably maybe) but wanna write anyways.





	1. Cosmic Notice-Me-Not

**Author's Note:**

> "Cosmic Notice-Me-Not" summary: basically an SIOC that no one really notices despite her best efforts.

            Hogwarts feasts never tired of giving her too much incentive to eat way too much, something Maggie always seemed to forget the moment she sat down at the Ravenclaw table. Not once before her six years here, back when she had been in 2017 instead of the fucking 90’s, did Maggie ever taste food more exquisite. Pulling her long, strawberry-blonde curls into a bun that was only slightly less messy up than down, Maggie salivated at the long line of food down her table.

            The feast was nearly over, but Maggie always had room for dessert, and that treacle tart was looking absolutely divine.

            Before she could even take a bite, though, all the food disappeared back to the kitchens, signaling the end of the feast. Fork hovering just above the empty space where her third tart had previously sat, Maggie pouted with a sigh. Just like usual, no one quite noticed, as though she were just another talking painting. It always took quite a bit for people to actually notice her – like how she had met Tom, for example, back in ’89, crying in the Alley entrance behind the Leaky Cauldron at three in the morning.

            Looking up towards the head table, Maggie watched as Headmaster Dumbledore rose to his feet for the second time that evening.

            “So!” he said, seeming to make eye contact with everyone but her, smiling. “Now that we are all fed and watered, I must once more ask for your attention, while I give out a few notices.

            “Mr. Filch, the caretaker, has asked me to tell you that the list of objects forbidden inside the castle has this year been extended to include Screaming Yo-yos, Fanged Frisbees, and Ever-Bashing Boomerangs. The full list comprises some four hundred and thirty-seven items, I believe, and can be viewed in Mr. Filch’s office, if anybody would like to check it.”

            Maggie might actually do that, if only to see cranky old Mrs. Norris. Animals had no trouble noticing her, after all.

            “As ever, I would like to remind you all that the forest on the grounds is out-of-bounds to students, as is the village of Hogsmeade to all below third year.

            “It is also my painful duty to inform you that the Inter-House Quidditch Cup will not take place this year.”

            _Oh good lord_ , Maggie thought to herself, gaping. Quidditch was the only goddamn sport she actually _liked_ and followed! It was… It was practically synonymous with Hogwarts!

            All around her, her fellow students and Housemates were aghast, some shouting and some, like her, gaping in shock. Cho Chang, Maggie noticed, had half-risen to her feet in fury. The younger girl had, after all, had to fight so hard to be on the team.

            “This is due,” continued Dumbledore, “to an event that will be starting in October, and continuing throughout the school year, taking up much of the teachers’ time and energy – but I am sure you will all enjoy it immensely. I have great pleasure in announcing that this year at Hogwarts-”

            Thunder roared overhead as the enchanted ceiling showed lightning streaking across the sky. The Great Hall’s doors slammed open in a noise that deafened the clouds above them, making Maggie jump and flinch away from whoever had done that. Heads swiveling towards the entrance, every student looked to the figure who stood in the doorway, shrouded in a ratty black cloak. Face illuminated in the light of lightning strikes above, Maggie felt her gut turn over and a chill sweep through her.

            The last time she had felt this great of trepidation had been in her third year when she made saw Professor Quirrell for the first time. The man rumored to be in kahoots with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named that Harry Potter defeated over the Philosopher’s Stone.

            Maggie decidedly did not like this man. Fortunately for her, just like everyone without cause to truly note her, his eyes (even the glass one moving wildly about) swept over her as though she were under a Notice-Me-Not. With a dull, contradictively-resonating thunk of his peg-leg prosthetic, the wizard limped forward with purpose, regular eye focused on the Headmaster whilst the glass one roamed on. Walking right between the Slytherin and Ravenclaw tables, he passed Maggie close enough to touch.

            His face was covered in scars, not an inch left untouched. She leaned far away from him, nearly becoming one with the table. Unbidden, her hand reached into her pocket to grasp her wand tightly. Maggie wasn’t confident in her ability to win in a duel against such a battle-scarred man, but she would die trying.

            Despite her fears, though, the man did not so much as breathe out of turn as he passed her.

            After shaking the Headmaster’s hand, he sat down at the head table – in the DADA Professor’s chair. Maggie closed her eyes as the Headmaster began to speak.

            “May I introduce our new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher?” _Dear God why was it always DADA? This didn’t start until Harry Potter was fucking sorted, I blame him._ “Professor Moody.”

            Maggie’s eyebrows rose. In the summer of ’90 she had been devouring news and history books like a fiend with the cops on their tail. She had thirsted to understand the history of her new home now that she finally accepted her place in it, however temporary. Alastor “Mad-eye” Moody. Ex-Auror, WWW veteran, as well as having an Order of Merlin, First Class, under his belt in the ’70-’81 war against Dark Lord No-Name. She had been right in thinking she’d loose in a duel against him.

            How in the hell was he their DADA teacher?

            “As I was saying,” Headmaster Dumbledore interrupted her internal monologue, jolting her into awareness. “We are to have the honor of hosting a very exciting event over the coming months, an event that has not been held for over a century. It is my very great pleasure to inform you that the Triwizard Tournament will be taking place at Hogwarts this year.”

            “You’re JOKING,” shouted one of the Weasley twins over at the Gryffindor table.

            The tense atmosphere broke under the boy’s voice, and Maggie burst into laughter at the sheer hilarity of the situation, like many other students. The only ones who didn’t were most of the Professors.

            “I am _not_ joking, Mr. Weasley,” the Headmaster continued, “though now that you mention it, I did hear an excellent one over the summer about a troll, a hag, and a leprechaun who all go into a bar…"

            Professor McGonagall cleared her throat decidedly, glaring at the Headmaster, who chuckled.

            “Er – but maybe this is not the time… no…” he said. “Where was I? Ah yes, the Triwizard Tournament… well, some of you will not know what this tournament involves, so I hope those who do know will forgive me for giving a short explanation, and allow their attention to wander freely.”

            Maggie did, in fact, know of it. And it gave her a brilliant idea.

            For as long as she’d been in this world, she’d been tried desperately to get peoples’ attentions. Whatever magic had brought her here, though, had left it terribly hard to get even a friendly conversation with someone at a bus stop. Her teachers only noticed her enough to grade her essays and homework and comment on her high standing in castle rankings. She had long hoped that, perhaps, she would gain the attention of someone of knowledge of time-travel like her’s, but had long given up on such a notion.

            But that prize, she thought as she listened carefully to the Headmaster. She could use those galleons to do so much. Pay Tom back for everything he had done for her, buy more spellbooks to learn from, maybe even put towards rent of an apartment of her own… She turned seventeen for the second time, according to her own guessing on dates, on September 22.

            But, as the Headmaster dismissed the student body for the night, Maggie drooped. All around her, every student no matter were they of age to compete, were whispering of entering. Very few seemed impartial to the idea. With the odds of numbers stacked against her, along with the cosmic Notice-Me-Not, Maggie doubted she had a snowball’s chance in hell of actually being chosen as the Hogwarts Champion.

            Best to put it out of her mind.

 

* * *

 

            Maggie Wolfe enjoyed her mornings in Ravenclaw Tower, enjoyed the eccentricity of her Housemates, and especially enjoyed how no one saw a problem with her lounging about the dorm room in white, lacy lingerie covered only by a robin-egg blue, chunky sweater that reached down her thighs and covered her finger tips, reading a text on experimental transfiguration in offensive and defensive contexts. Marlon Wells, she decided, had aptly titled his book; _Transforming Protection: The Art of Transfiguration in Duels_ was nice, but a bit lengthy.

            Lately, her already large interests in using magic in all its capacity had doubled. She had first started learning how to defend herself with magic in her fourth year, when the Chamber of Secrets was open and she – either a Muggle in a weird situation or a Muggleborn, displaced out of time no matter – was at great risk.

            DADA this year did not help.

            Professor Moody had started every class, despite grade levels, with a dark-sort of ‘entertainment;’ the Unforgivables, all used on a spider. And the next class period? Practice with throwing off the Imperius curse.

            Maggie shivered, remembering that cold voice in her head, demanding her body and her actions. She had only been able to throw the curse off after the twelfth go-around. Looking at her book, she realized she’d not read a single word in three pages and quickly flipped back.

            Yes, Maggie was suddenly incredibly more interested in her own defense. She just had a terrible feeling that she would regret it if she didn’t learn.

            (It was decidedly _not_ because she wanted to duel someone in the tournament, not even a smidge.)

            Her classes, outside of DADA, were going as well as usual. In Transfiguration she continued to soar above and beyond Professor McGonagall’s expectations, absorbing the knowledge of changing the shape of reality with a feverish intensity. It was the most magical thing, aside from Potions, that Maggie had known of before the whole cosmic-time-displacment business, and quite fascinating regardless. Herbology was no longer a must for her, but she still enjoyed the study hall she took in the greenhouses, amongst the safer vegetation.

Potions was perhaps her second favorite class, despite how hard-won all points from Professor Snape were got; sometimes she caught the greasy-haired Professor staring at her as though seeing someone else entirely, and she wondered who he thought of. Clearly someone of great importance to him, as he seemed to avoid her table all-together, and when he did take points from her, it was always quietly, as though he didn’t want another soul to hear. (This was the same with giving points, as well.)

Charms was about as well as usual, her grades good through sheer force of will as the technicalities of the craft had Maggie suffering. Astronomy was cold but beautiful, Ancient Runes was fascinating, Arithmancy was as close to math as she could get, and her Magical Art class was riveting with colors.


	2. a wand for revolutionaries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pansy doesn't want to be involved, goddammit, but her emotions get the best of her despite how cold hearted she wished she were. Especially when she knew the person she was becoming attached to had an expiration date coming up soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i give no explanation towards the origins of this shit. in my head, i've got ideas, but am too lazy to put them down. i have too many lines or lineholders through out this shit, i'm not going through to make them all individually a line right now, so deal with the --//'s.

“Parkinson, how many times have I told you to stop doing this,” a voice said behind her, dripping with exhaustion and irritability. Pansy didn’t bother flinching, simply flicked the ashes off the end of her cigarette over the edge of tower.

Cedric Diggory stood behind her, still decked out in his Hufflepuff robes despite it being well past midnight, Prefect badge gleaming in the moonlight. His arms were crossed sternly, and he was frowning. Pansy’s face didn’t change as she took another deep drag, reveling in the burn of nicotine and smoke.

“Just counting this year?” she asked, blowing smoke up into the air and watching his nose shrivel up like he was smelling a dungbomb. “Or this week?”

Cedric – because what else could she call him when she knew how he would die – sighed through his nose as though he were faced with one of the Weasley twins, before reaching down and snatching her half-smoked cigarette from her hands. Putting it out on a column next to them, he then tossed the bud over the edge. Pansy watched it go with a sigh.

“For one thing,” Cedric began, a lecture Pansy now knew by heart, “you’re too young to smoke cigarettes, even Muggle ones. I did my research. And if that weren’t enough, I have told you repeatedly that you can not be out past curfew, yet here you are, for the third day in a row.”

“Yeah,” she rolled her eyes, pulling her thick cloak around her tighter. “What’s your point.”

Cedric reached up to rub the bridge of his nose angrily. “10 points from Slytherin. Now get back to your dorm before I give you detention.”

Pansy sighed – there seemed to be a lot of that going on – and stood up. Even though she was older and taller than most her yearmates, at fifteen Pansy only reached up Cedric’s shoulders. It made sense, she thought. He was seventeen and two years ahead of her, probably already thinking of putting his name into the competition Dumbledore had announced three weeks earlier at the start of term. A big, unmoving target for an Avada Kedavra.

She remembered the first time she saw him after Remembering. How she had been struck with the fact of how…matyr-ish Cedric Diggory looked. Big and broad, with a pretty face and gold eyes. No wonder Harry Potter would agonize over his death for the rest of his life.

Now when she looked at him, all she saw was a tomb stone and the boy who frequently caught her smoking to escape. The boy who, when he first caught her, had asked her what was wrong and why she was crying. The boy she had spat insults at to keep away before running back to the dungeons with her tail between her legs.

He really was just a boy.

As she walked past him to the staircase that led to the seventh floor, she paused.

“Hey, Diggory.”

He was watching her, as though to make sure she would actually listen to him. “Yes?”

“Don’t enter the tournament,” she pleaded – no, she _ordered_ , but somehow it sounded like begging.

Cedric looked as though he was going to say something in response, before shaking his head in confusion. Pansy stayed a moment longer, long enough to feel the breeze once more and try to burn the image of him alive into her eyelids like she did everyone she knew would die. And then she started to trudge her way back to the Slytherin dorms, one slow step at a time, knowing Cedric was trailing after her just to make sure she made it there.

\--//

Sometimes, Pansy wondered if, were the Hat to sort her with all her Memories intact, where it would have put her. She especially wondered this whenever she was surrounded by her Slytherin yearmates. Forced to listen to Draco Malfoy whine about Quidditch at the Great Hall table was a torture great enough that she almost wished to rip the Slytherin badge off her robes in the hopes that she’d never see his prissy little face again.

This was one of the shifts caused by Remembering. The merging of two lifetimes in one girl, the knowledge of the future because some bint decided to make a career out of it had odd effects. No longer did she enjoy grape jam the way she’d done before Remembering, but neither did she enjoy strawberry jam the way she had in her Memories – in fact, Pansy didn’t enjoy jam at all anymore. Many things had changed about her, and Pansy no longer knew how much of either of herselves remained truly.

Maybe the hat would’ve put her in Gryffindor, she thought, glancing across the hall.

Cedric was watching her. Pansy looked away nonchalantly and ‘focused’ back on Draco. She didn’t even realize she had lifted her hand to her mouth until half her thumbnail was gone. Pansy refused to acknowledge Cedric outside of the times they ran into each other after curfew, simply to preserve her sanity. There were very few Slytherins that she knew of who would die gruesomely and thus, her House was a safe haven for her emotions. Other Houses, not so much.

“Are you even listening, Pansy?” Draco suddenly demanded, looking affronted.

“Not in the least, darling, but don’t let that stop you,” she said, acid dripping from every word.

Any sympathy she held for Draco Malfoy upon Remembering had shriveled up and turned to ash the first night back when all he could rave about was how he knew about the tournament all along and that his father was going to get him into it no matter the age restriction.

He harrumphed, offended but unwilling to start anything in front of the rest of the school. Once they were back in the dungeons, though, she had no doubt he would tear into her as best he could.

“I’ll see you in Potions, Draco,” she said, rising from her seat and watching with apathy how none of her former friends stood to follow.

She had a free period first, today, after dropping Divination the second day. Thankfully. She needed to continue practicing with the wand that no longer fit her if she was going to pass any of her practical classes. Her bag swinging on her shoulder, Pansy marched out of the castle and down towards the Lake – and then further, to the side nearest to the Forest where many older students could be found after dark for a tryst.

Spreading her cloak inside-out on the ground, she sat on top of it and got out her First Year Charms textbook and her wand. Without the specially-made, extra-light feathers, she had improvised with a quill.  Her wand – ebony, 8 ¾”, with a dragon heartstring core – had once allowed her to lift a goddamn coffee table without breaking a sweat.

_Swish_. “Wingardium Leviosa.” _And flick._

The quill didn’t do more than twitch. Pansy closed her eyes and thought about the past three weeks of disappointed stares from Flitwick and McGonagall and even Sprout. Of the terror she felt in the presence of their Defense Professor, Moody or Crouch or whatever he wanted to be called when wearing another’s face, when she _knew_ she couldn’t protect herself at all were he to demonstrate on them the Cruciatus like he had the spider. The Imperius had been bad enough.

Pansy opened her text book to the first page. Like yesterday and the day before and the day before, today would be hard. She still had no goddamn clue when she would be able to get to Diagon Alley to buy another wand. Truthfully, she didn’t know how she would bloody well do it in any capacity. Would she be able to catch a train to a nearby town? Would she have to wait until the next Hogsmeade visit in fucking November, or would she have to sneak out?  Her mother worked in Knockturn at a bookshop and frequented Gringotts as it was – how the hell would Pansy not run into her?

Over the summer, Pansy had been slowly taking all the funds out of her allowance vault and putting them back into a separate vault set up without her parents’ knowledge. She did it with small enough amounts, on a set basis with the Goblins, that they thought she was wasting her money away like she had Before, and kept refilling it once the time was up. It cost her to have this done, so she lost ten galleons for every one hundred, but her parents were rich fuckers so she didn’t care. There was already nearly a thousand galleons in her vault. All she had to do was access it.

Her focus had shattered, thinking about this. The quill was on fire, making Pansy groan and toss it into the lake where it sizzled on top of the surface for a minute. Once it finally stopped burning, she watched it sink beneath the green-black surface. Closing her eyes, Pansy allowed herself to fall back onto the grass, covering her eyes with the heels of her palms. Vigorously rubbing at them and then sitting back up, Pansy refused to scream her frustration out.

As she was putting her dark brown hair (which she hadn’t cut for nearly a year now, and was reaching past her shoulders instead of her old bob) up into a tight bun, though, someone stepped out of the nearby foliage. The sudden rustle of leaves and the appearance of a person had Pansy jolting on her ass and nearly falling backwards as she raised her hands up in a faux-karate-like position. As though she could fight someone off with her _great martial arts skills_. Already she felt embarrassed, doubly so when she realized who had scared her.

“ _What_ do you want, Diggory?” she demanded, suddenly itching for a cigarette. “How long have you been in those bushes? _Why_ were you in those bushes?”

For a moment, he almost looked like he was going rub the back of his head sheepishly, his hand twitching and his shoulders hunched for a split second. But then his back straightened and he rolled his eyes, stuffing his hands into his pockets.

“I was wondering why you weren’t in class,” he huffed, frowning down at her. “I saw you leave during breakfast. But then… I saw you practicing the Levitation Charm. Or trying to, at least.”

Pansy narrowed her eyes and glared. “Oh? I’ll have you know I have a free period right now. What’s it to you what I do with it?”

Cedric threw his hands up, looking at the sky as though begging for mercy, sighing through his nose. “Whatever, Parkinson. _Don’t_ tell me why you’re having trouble with a bloody First Year spell. I don’t care.”

And then he stomped off, clearly very much caring. Pansy wondered what she had done Before to have deserved this. Was it the suicide attempts? The stealing? Or her alternate-self’s actions of following the Dark Lord? Pansy turned back to her book and got out another quill. A glance at her watch told her she still had an hour before Potions.

Cedric Diggory could go bugger himself for all she cared, and she _did not care_. She’d write it on his fucking tombstone.

\--//

The next time that Cedric caught her smoking was three days later, sitting in an abandoned classroom with all the windows open, perched on a desk near one. Her eyes were rimmed red from lack of sleep, dreams filled with scenes of a future and a life she had yet to live or lived in another life, her nails were all chewed to the quick, and within two hours she’d smoked half a pack of malboros. Today had been terrible, as she’d failed a Transfiguration assignment and lost points in Charms all because she had changed too much for her stupid fucking wand to comprehend.

So here she was, dressed in her silk pajamas that, before Remembering, she had hated for their simplicity but now was grateful for, barefoot and cold, a cigarette clenched between her lips whilst she glared at the offending piece of wood. She’d thrown it across the room ten minutes earlier in a pique of rage.

And Cedric fucking Diggory had just walked in.

“Parkinson,” he half-groaned, half-spat. “For Merlin’s sake, what is the matter with you?”

“ _Save it,_ Diggory, and fuck off,” she spat, not caring at all in the moment how swearing might up the ante on her punishment. “I’m not in the mood.”

Silence greeted her declaration, not the usual spiel of health factors, rules, and moral bullshit that she usually got from him. When she looked over, he was glancing between her and her wand, which lay in a corner, with an unreadable look in his eyes. Her lips curled. She refused to be pitied, but instead of spewing vitriol like she wanted, she just took another drag of her cigarette.

“Why were you having trouble with the Levitation Charm?” Cedric asked, leaving the door open behind him as he came closer to her.

Pansy pretended she hadn’t heard him, finished her cigarette and flung it out the window. Completely ignoring him was easier than answering. She gathered her cigarettes and her lighter, scooped her wand off the ground, and walked past him. Cedric grabbed her shoulder.

“Let go of me, Diggory.”

“Why,” he demanded, “did you tell me not to enter the tournament?”

“Because you’re an idiot,” she spat. “And idiots die in the Triwizard Tournament.”

Her words did just as she intended them to. Cedric flinched as if struck, hand slipping from her silk-clad shoulder, and she stalked away. Maybe now he would leave her alone. Maybe now he wouldn’t enter the tournament. Maybe she had saved a life. Maybe she could be more than what she was fated to be – a mean-hearted, Dark witch.

She didn’t look back as she walked out of the room.

\--//

For the next five weeks, Pansy made very little progress with her wand and her grades were suffering for it. She had been forced to blackmail Tracey Davis into doing all her transfigurations and in-class practicing for her. Every free period she sat by the lake like usual, smoked cigarettes and fumed at her wand. And every free period that was in the morning, Cedric Diggory sat with her.

At first he had tried to talk her out of smoking, but when she had ignored him for a good week he gave up and cast a Bubble Head Charm on himself. She glared enviously at how easily he’d done it, too. They were supposed to be learning Bubble Heads in class.

After a while, he had even tried coaching her. He didn’t ask again why she was unable to use her wand properly, but he always had a dark look in his eyes when he saw her failures. No matter what she tried, though, nothing worked and the first Hogsmeade visit wasn’t until November. With Beauxbatons and Durmstrang arriving soon, too, Pansy was struck with how terribly not ready she was for what this Tournament would bring. War.

With a sound that was a mixture between a scream and a sob, she chucked her wand into the grass away from her and Cedric, who was doing his Herbology homework for today. He looked up at her noise, brows pulling together, but didn’t say anything. Bastard. Why couldn’t he annoy her with his voice so that she could piss him off into leaving.

Falling backwards and slamming into the ground so hard the air was forced out of her lungs, Pansy covered her face with her arm and contemplated death. (Maybe she was being overdramatic.)

“Do you think it’s possible to change so much over a single summer that your wand no longer chooses you?” she asked quietly after a few minutes of silence.

Cedric didn’t respond. After a few minutes, she felt her ears flush red and wished she hadn’t said anything. As it were, she reached for her cigarettes, putting one between her lips and staring up at the treetops as she lit it.

As she blew smoke into the air, he finally spoke. “I’ve never heard of it before, but honestly, after everything I’d have to say yeah.”

She snorted and blew smoke out her nose. “You say that like you know me so well.”

“Don’t I?” he asked wryly and she glared. “What do you say you and I go to Diagon Alley tonight. So that you can get a new wand.”

“Why don’t I just go by myself,” she spat, rolling onto her side to look away from him.

Cedric laughed, like that was all that needed to be said. “Like you know how to get to Diagon Alley in the middle of a school week.”

Bloody Hufflepuffs. Liars, the lot of them, tricking the entire student body and a future fandom into thinking them saints. They were the real Slytherins.

\--//

Hogs Head was nearly empty so close to dark on a Thursday. No one looked twice and she and Cedric, neither wearing Hogwarts robes but simple, plain black ones. Just through the back of it was a designated Apparition Point that she and Cedric would use, which was a great deal easier than her sneaking onto a train in the night like she had half-way planned.

Part of her still couldn’t believe that a Prefect – a Hufflepuff Prefect – was sneaking a Slytherin out of school grounds. Hell, out of the bloody country. But Cedric acted as though this were just a Sunday stroll, so Pansy faked the confidence as well.

Apparition was a fucking joke, she decided within the next ten minutes and one vomit later as Cedric stood a foot away from like he’d contract a disease.

“Some friend you are,” she muttered, before realizing her mistake and shutting her mouth. Cedric grinned at her, wide eyed at the slip. “Move it, dumbass. Gringotts is closing soon.”

Soon, with ten galleons in her pockets and her useless wand in hand, she and Cedric entered Ollivanders for what was the second time in their life. No one really went back with the intention of buying a new wand for themselves, after all. Ollivander was standing behind the counter, as though he were about to start cleaning up shop for the night.

Pansy lowered her hood and stepped forward. “Mr. Ollivander. I don’t know if you remember me, but-“

“No, I remember,” he spoke softly, his voice echoing through the store like a breeze that chilled her spine. “Ms. Parkinson. Ebony wood. 8 ¾”. Dragon Heartstring. Rather unwieldy, particular towards Potions, wasn’t it? Has it been giving you trouble?”

She nodded, holding it forward. “Hasn’t worked at all since school started this year. I need a new one.”

Ollivander motioned for Pansy to give it a wave, which she did. Nothing happened, and he made a hum in the back of his through as Cedric pulled his own hood down and sat in the corner chair. Without hesitation, he snapped his wand to attention and Pansy was suddenly surrounded by tape measures in the oddest of places.

“Your wand arm hasn’t changed,” he murmured, a quill and parchment following his words next to his head. “I wonder what of the combination no longer suits… Alright. Let’s begin. Acacia and dragon heartstring, 9”.”

Somewhere in the back of the shop, something exploded at her wand wave. Wincing, she shoved it back into Ollivander’s hands as he muttered.

One after the other, wand after wand, Pansy tried and failed to find the perfect wand for herself. With each failure, Ollivander grew more excited and the more bored Cedric got. By the time the moon was starting to rise, Ollivander was grinning ear to ear, Cedric was antsy, and Pansy was growing hopeless.

“Quite the odd combination for a Parkinson,” Ollivander murmured as he brought the next box out. “However, I think it might suit such a changed one nicely. Aspen wood, 12 ½”, with a phoenix feather core. Slightly springy. Aspen wood, my father told me quite often, is for the revolutionaries, stubborn and determined folks who bring about change.”

With a description like that, Pansy didn’t want to touch the damned thing. Not with what she knew to come. It seemed like some sort of prophecy, one she didn’t goddamn want. With a scowl, she took the chillingly-white wand and gave it a wave.

Instantly it was clear to her. Pansy had never felt so self-assured in her life, so invigorated. Like she was drunk and high at the same time, dancing at a concert, but also flying on a broom, determined to get the last point in a near-tied game. Sparks flew from the wand in a shimmer of gold that danced through the air and Ollivander clapped.

“Finally,” Cedric groaned, jumping out of the chair.

“That’ll be seven galleons – five if you return your previous wand to me,” Ollivander bargained.

Just to prove she could, Pansy levitated the money and previous wand out of her pockets to Ollivander. The aspen wand sang under her attention.

Cedric grinned, clapping a hand on her shoulder as they left, the shop door locking behind them. The Apparition back to Hogs Head didn’t seem quite as bad this time around.

\--//

Days later, she watched Cedric Diggory put his name in a goddamn goblet and sent a stinging hex at him in the hall afterwards. Pansy ran before he could catch that it was her. For some reason, she had trusted him.

\--//

“What is this, Granger?” Pansy groaned, standing as far as she could from the bushy-haired Gryffindor shoving pamphlets at anyone who stood too close in the halls. All of them read S.P.E.W. with a picture of a House Elf on them.

For the past day she had been avoiding Cedric, who seemed more determined than ever to either catch her smoking or by the lake. Thankfully, one sleepless night later she was caught up with the spells learned after vigorously trying to learn them on an inadequate wand for the past several weeks, and thus didn’t need to go to the lake. This was how she found herself on Hermione Granger’s radar in the hall that Pansy rarely traversed.

Granger didn’t look too happy to see her either, which Pansy knew she was at fault for. Before Remembering, Pansy had been a right bitch, a purist and a bully. However, she was happy to campaign at a standing-still face.

“The Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare, S.P.E.W., seeks to give House Elves the same liberties as wizards and witches through freedom,” Granger rattled off like a script. “For two sickles you can join and help campaign for elfish rights.”

Pansy nodded, thinking about what she vaguely remembered of this. She took a pamphlet. Granger seemed almost shell shocked that Pansy actually stood there long enough to read it. Without saying a word, Pansy tossed a few galleons into Granger’s collection jar, snatched a badge and began to walk off.

“Hey! Parkinson!” she heard Granger shout as she pinned the badge to her bag. “That’s too much!”

Pansy sighed and looked over her shoulder at Granger. “Shut up, Granger. I have Art, but find me later and tell me if S.P.E.W. has meetings.”

Leaving the shell-shocked Muggleborn behind, Pansy booked it to her class. She hated being nice.

Granger did, in fact, find her after Art, dragging her off to the Library with a face that showed both suspicion and elation. The two sat in a corner for the entire lunch period, discussing the ethics of forceful freedom on House Elves. Pansy even got Granger to consider the fact that most wizarding society were not ready for all out House Elf liberation and thus they would have to be in it for the long haul and would need the Elves agreement on everything. They could not be spokespeople of a species that disliked their tactics, after all.

The following weeks were, perhaps, the worst weeks of Pansy’s life since the night she woke up with Memories and had to deal with the aftermath.

Cedric was chosen as Hogwarts’ Champion, just like she knew he would. Every night she smoked was a race against seeing him, letting him catch her.

But so was Harry Potter. A Champion, she meant.

Her new acquaintance with Granger had already gotten her shit from her Housemates, angry that a Pureblood was friends with a Mudblood. Pansy had had to curse quite a few people in the Common Rooms to keep her social standing whilst limiting her time with Granger still. But as everyone in her House rallied under Cedric just to antagonize Potter, she couldn’t help but feel disgruntled at their stupidity – at Cedric’s stupidity – at the stupidity of the world.

And blast it all, Pansy didn’t want him to die. Desperately, she didn’t want him to die.

So she let herself be caught smoking one night, clutching a book to her chest that had notes within it to help him further if he bothered to read it. It was only a week before the First Task and god did she hope he could master something in time for this stupid thing. She was hardly surprised when he found her at three in the morning, an empty pack of next to her and a new one just opened.

“Parkinson,” he said, with a civilness that she could tell was fake.

“What, not friends enough to call me Pansy anymore?” she spat instinctively and almost immediately regretted it (and then regretted regretting it).

Cedric’s jaw clenched and she watched him through the corner of her eyes, blowing smoke the opposite direction. “I don’t understand why you’re such…such…”

“A bitch?” Pansy offered up, taking another drag. “It’s a talent.”

Cedric sighed, breathing deeply and flexing his hands as though trying to calm himself down. He probably was. Pansy was riling him up, just like usual. Wasn’t she supposed to be making amends? All she could think about was telling him not to enter – him entering – his future grave. A Hall filled with students toasting to his death.

Cedric pissed her off.

“20 points from Slytherin,” he snapped. Her eyes flickered up at him in surprise. “Back to your Dorm.”

Pansy shrugged, gathered her things and started to walk. As she passed him, she paused and held out the book and didn’t move until he took it.

“Good luck,” she mumbled. “Please try not to die.”

And then she ran.

\--//

The Task was terrifying, more so than it had any right to be. Pansy doesn’t envy any of the Champions in the arena, least of all Potter, the most inexperienced of them all. He does admirably, though – but none more so than Cedric.

He had taken her book and flourished, it seemed. She screamed her cheers alongside the rest of the Slytherins supporting him only because of Potter, as loud as any Hufflepuff. But then he’d taken just a side shot of fire and Pansy felt her heart stop.

The bloody fucking idiot was going to get himself killed. And not even the way he was supposed to.

When his turn was over, Pansy rushed from the stands as quietly as she could towards the Champions’ tent before pausing. Rita Skeeter had been skulking around the school for weeks, and Pansy knew for a fact that the woman was an Animagus. She’d see Cedric later.

And she did, sneaking to the Infirmary that night.

Cedric was sitting up in bed, paging through a book to the glow of his wand. Pansy slipped into the room as quietly as she could, but he still noticed. He grinned at her, soft and kind and altogether different from the look he had given her the week before.

“How did you know?” he asked quietly. “That it was dragons?”

The book in his lap, she realized, was the one she’d given him.

“Would you believe me if I said I saw it in a dream?” she almost said. Instead, what left her mouth was, “I have my sources.”

He nodded, as though this were a perfectly acceptable answer.

“I don’t know why you didn’t want me to enter,” he said after a moment before shaking his head. “No, I know. You… You were worried I’d get hurt. And look where I am now. But Pansy, see, everything is going to be fine. I’m in first place.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Pansy argued. She’d been trying to fight fate itself, not worrying. “Don’t jinx yourself, you idiot.”

Cedric grinned, lopsided and wide. “How’s your wand?”

“Perfect, would you like to test it?” she bared her teeth and raised it threateningly. He didn’t so much as freeze.

“Have you got anymore sources?” he asked, gesturing to the golden egg that sat at his bedside. “All it does is scream.”

Pansy thought. Maybe if she built trust with him in what to do, he might listen to her and not even go into the Maze.

“Open it underwater,” she said, and saw Cedric blink. He hadn’t actually seemed to expect anything. “It’s mermish. You can’t understand it above water.”

“Huh,” he mumbled, scratching his chin. “Where on earth do you figure these things out?”

Pansy shrugged, reaching up to chew on her middle nail. Cedric reached out to swat her hand from her mouth but she leaned away, making him laugh. They both froze at the reverberating sound.

“You should probably go,” he said quietly.

Pansy nodded. “I’ll see you around.”

“Don’t stop for a smoke, Pansy,” he ordered as she left, to which she laughed. “I’m serious! Pansy-“

She shut the door and cut him off.

She smoked three cigarettes before she returned to the Common Room.

\--//

When the Yule Ball was announced, Pansy had no intentions of going at all. She smoked and she devoured spell after spell, dueled with Cedric in an attempt for practice, she hid flyers for S.P.E.W. under peoples’ plates before anyone entered the Great Hall, she did her homework. She ignored Draco’s attempts to ask her to the Ball.

On the 16th, Cedric caught her out after curfew for the third time that week. This time she was in a third floor classroom, smoking and staring at the stars. He didn’t say anything, simply sat beside her with a Bubble Head Charm.

When the end of another hour approached, along with the end of her fourth cigarette, he finally spoke up.

“Pansy,” Cedric said. “Has anyone asked you to the Ball?”

She raised an eyebrow at him, wondering if this had to do with Cho Chang, who she vaguely Remembered he went with. Maybe he was trying to get advice to ask her. Wasn’t Potter supposed to soon? She couldn’t remember.

“Malfoy has,” Pansy admitted, seeing Cedric frown. “I know, right? I’ve pretended to speak another language whenever he tries. It’s hilarious. Boy doesn’t know when to give up.”

“You’re not going with him?” Cedric pushed, and Pansy shook her head. “Then will you go with me?”

Pansy, who had been in the midst of a drag, swallowed and began coughing furiously as smoke tried to enter her stomach. She felt like she was going to vomit from it, a mistake she hadn’t made in an entire lifetime. Cedric flew from his seat to smack her back with his fist until she could breathe again.

“Did-” she wheezed. “Did you just…ask me to the Yule Ball?”

Cedric nodded. He looked wary.

Pansy desperately took another drag.

“Why?” she demanded.

“Why not?” he parried.

She couldn’t afford to become more attached. She was talking to a dying man.

“Alright… I’ll go with you.”

\--//

The Yule Ball was beautiful – truly a winter ball, which Pansy had been to many as a child. She wore a dark red dress the color of wine that reached her knees, had a scoop neck and quarter sleeves, black heels, and a piece of obsidian around her neck. Cedric had demanded to match and thus wore black dress robes with red accents. She sees glimpses of Potter and Cho Chang, clashing horribly but both of them grinning wildly as they dance, of Krum and Granger, a duo of giggles, and spots Ron Weasley sulking around.

After all the stuffy dancing had ended, the punch spiked and both incredibly tipsy, the Weird Sisters went on stage. She and Cedric forced their way into the crowd. The Ball was supposed to end at midnight but truly ran on till nearly two in the morning. She and Cedric didn’t miss a second of it.

For once, Pansy looked at Cedric and didn’t see a bleak future. She saw a boy with rosy cheeks, a wide grin, and a booming laugh. When she escaped the throngs of people leaving, forced out by Professors, he followed but did not reprimand. He didn’t say a word as she climbed up to a tower and began smoking. He simply sat by her and held her hand the way he’d been all night. She stared at their tangled fingers and wondered if her heart would crumble like cigarette ash when he died.

\--//

“What are we?” Pansy finally asks, halfway into January.

She and Cedric are sitting together near the Black Lake. It’s the middle of the afternoon, it’s chilly, and they’re huddled together for warmth. Just warmth. Clearly. She’s even smoking in broad daylight. Pansy wonders what Howler she’ll get from her parents this week about it.

“What are you okay with being?” Cedric asks simply, as though he doesn’t have the power to destroy her.

She glares. “We’re clearly a pair of dumbasses. Fuck off and answer the question, Diggory.”

He grins and pushes his cold nose into her neck so she blows smoke at him in retaliation.

“Well,” Cedric finally says, tracing runes onto the back of her hand. “I thought we might be dating. If that’s alright with you.”

She’s silent for a long moment. “It’s the end of the world. I’m dating a Hufflepuff.”

He bursts into happy giggles against her neck, pulling her against his chest in a hug. She only calls him a name once. She’s going to cry so badly when this is all over.

\--//

The Second Task is terrible and she’s not just saying this because of how she was kept unconscious underwater for a day. It’s terrible because Cedric gets clingy afterwards, as though if he looks away for a moment, she’ll disappear back to the merpeople’s clutches. At first Pansy had relished in it, wondering if he would be gone this time next year. After a week or two, though, it just got old.

The fight they have over it is their first and worst, she thinks.

Thankfully it ended with sinful make-up sex. Their first sex, actually. It’s quite sweet, what Cedric set up, so she doesn’t call him names too much.

\--//

“ _Swear to me that you won’t take the cup if you don’t have to,”_ she had begged the night before. “ _Promise me, Cedric. Please.”_

She’s crying over his dead body alongside Mr. Diggory less than 24 hours later whilst Harry Potter gets dragged off by Not-Moody. Why did she ever think she could save him?

A wand for revolutionaries, Ollivander had said. Fuck revolution. She was starting anarchy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So basically, I wanted to write this in how Pansy actually ends up working with Hermione a lot more, eventually becoming friends with Harry and Ron through her, involved in the DA, has to abandon her family because of the whole Ministry of Magic DoM battle shebang and live at Grimmauld, becomes friends with Sirius - somehow? idk, i kinda wanted them to end up in a queerplatonic poly thing where Pansy was romantic with Sirius who was sexual and romantic with both her and Remus, who was sexual and romantic with him and Tonks but platonic with Pansy, and Tonks was queerplatonic with Pansy, sexual and romantic with Remus, and familial with Sirius. idk. cedric was supposed to be avenged. the only people Pansy ends up being able to save is Sirius, at first, but then he nearly dies with Remus and Tonks...yeah I was gonna give Pansy a ton of angst. tons. Also, i never mentioned, but if anyone wants to steal these ideas and use them, just hmu and link me, i'll read the shit out of that.


	3. annotations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> annotations are a glimpse into a conversation with an author who will never hear, like a glimpse into a soul.

            Cassie remembers clearly the first time she wrote in a book with the intention of commentary, or annotation. It had been in 10th grade English, when Ms. James gave everyone their own personal copy of _Fahrenheit 451_ to annotate for a grade. They had been given a rubric to follow – underline supporting evidence to an argument, circle unfamiliar words and define them, and so on and so forth. She hadn’t been able to do that for more than a page before her annotation had devolved into snark in the margins, quips about the characters’ decisions, or paragraphs of philosophical musings about the characters. Ms. James had given her a 100%, despite looking quite exasperated.

            It had been freeing, she thought. More than a decade of being told not to ruin books, to see her mother never even open some because they were simply “too expensive to touch” – touching pen to paper felt like a revelation of biblical proportions. Like she was sharing her very soul with the author, or anyone else who might pick up the annotated book to read.

             And baring your soul was hard for anyone.

            But.

            Staring down at the kid who sat on a swing set alone, perhaps maybe fifteen years old to her seventeen, she couldn’t help but notice that he looked so lonely. He had nothing in his hands to mess around with, not a phone or a newspaper, nothing to do but stare up at the sky and swing. Cassie normally came to this park to read in peace and quiet, the smell of grass and inked paper being her ambrosia. Only a few weeks into summer, though, and it was invaded.

            Somehow, she wasn’t angry, though. Maybe it had something to do with the inquisitive look the boy kept shooting her book, following the movements of her pen across the pages. It was a worn, old copy of _Canary_ by Duane Swierczynski, cover bright yellow, the spine cracked and the page edges worn, creases where she had dogeared her places. This was her only copy of the book, but she knew the story by heart these days. It was filled to the brim with her doodles and notes, confessions that she didn’t dare speak out loud – something she thought the main character would relate to.

            Suddenly, inspiration struck as the boy looked away again as she looked up.

            Flipping to the title page, that she had left alone mostly except for her name in the top corner.

            _Note from the Owner,_ she wrote.

            Cassie closed the book one final time, taking a long look at the cover. She would miss it, but there were more books out there, too.

            Before she lost her nerve, Cassie stood – startling the dark-haired boy so hard his glasses nearly fell off – and shoved it at the boy after getting close enough. It was in his face so much that she could barely see his face around it. Good. She didn’t think her nerves would stand up to eye contact.

            “Merry Christmas,” she said despite it being the middle of June, dropped it in his lap, along with her pen – which she hadn’t meant to drop, dammit, too late now – and turned tail to run away.

            Cassie Johnson hoped that this was enough good karma for the year.

\--//

            Harry watched the back of the strange girl who had run away after practically throwing her book at him. _Merry Christmas_?

            He looked down at the book and pen in his lap.

            Initially, he had noticed her because she was sitting in the park that was normally abandoned during the summers enough to be a safe haven from the Dursleys. Unable to let himself be run out of it, he had determinedly sat on the swing like usual and tried to ignore the girl on the bench reading. But then he had noticed she was writing in her book – _writing!_ Hermione would have cuffed the girl’s ears so bad had she seen!

            It had soon devolved into him wondering what she was reading and why she wrote in the book.

            He certainly hadn’t expected this, though.

            Opening the book, he was struck by how worn it was. The spine bent easily in his hands, the page corners crinkled and creased, and there was a lot of pen ink in it. On the cover page, he spied the girl’s name – Cassie Johnson – and… a note.

            _I annotated this copy after many reads, so the annotations are quite revealing to the plot. However, I hope that you annotate this book yourself – if you can find any free space yourself! Anything from a grocery list or just swears is fine. But also don’t feel like you have to._

_I have loved this book from the moment it entered my hands, so I hope you do, too._

            Huh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so basically i wanted this to be one of those Harry's friends with a muggle fics but whatever


	4. temporal displacings

            The fuck?

            I stared around in a calm sort of way that didn’t accurately betray the shellshocked thoughts running through my mind like a headless chicken. The door I had walked through was supposed to lead to my math class. It had definitely not led to math class. Maybe I hadn’t been paying enough attention to where I was walking, having been reading as I walked and relying on muscle memory.

            But no. No door in my school, in the buttfuck of nowhere, Missouri, would lead to wherever the fuck I was now.

            So, I repeated – outside my mind this time – those two words. “The _fuck_?”

            A passerby dressed in a long-sleeved, high-collared, floor-length black nightgown and a pointed, floppy-brimmed hat gave me the stink eye, dragging a child behind her who looked happily scandalized at my words. I watched them walk away passed the point of polite curiosity and saw the child finally stop staring, looking quite creeped out.

            This was definitely not Missouri. Buttfuck of Nowhere didn’t have cobbled streets, towering boutique-sized buildings advertising things like broomsticks and potion supplies, no one here had that subtle almost-southern accent – instead, they sported accents that ranged from posh English to barely understandable Scottish brogue. I was probably the most out of place person in a mile radius, being what appeared to be the only one dressed in recognizable fashion. Everyone else was wearing nightgowns or robes over their clothes, and my backpack stood out like a red flag planted on my head.

            I closed my book after dogearing the page I was on, slipped one arm out of the straps of my backpack and shoved the book into it. I looked behind me, staring at the large bronze double doors I’d stepped through – alternately, at the door that _wasn’t_ the wooden frame of a school room door that I had stepped through – and the small, mean-faced…beings that framed it, glaring at me. I had not come through that tilted, marble building. So how the fuck. You know what. No.

            Turning away, I plopped down onto the marble steps that led to cobbled streets, completely interrupting the path of people going in and out of the building behind me. How many shits did I give, though? None. I pulled out my phone, never being more thankful for it, and tried to call my mom.

            I got the dial tone, something I hadn’t heard in over five years after the invention of the voicemail or that prerecorded saying of a line being disconnected.

            I checked the service bars, but they were full.

            I tried every number in my goddamn contacts list, even my old boss’ number from a job I’d been fired from two years ago, but nothing worked. Fuckin’ shit, not even the fucking 911 dispatch service worked!

            “Excuse me, ma’am?” a lilting voice interrupted my furious phone-tapping as I tried to send swear-filled text after swear-filled text.

            Looking up, I scowled at the woman speaking. She was short, shorter than me, with a bob of dark brown hair framing a sharp, angled face. Her nose was large and stuck out like a beak, and there was a dark mole under her right eye, gold irises narrowed despite her genial face. She wore a dark purple nightgown with gold cufflinks and a swooping neckline that revealed a dress shirt and gold tie beneath it, a slit up the front of her dress to the waist revealing black slacks and heels. There was a badge on her breast that read Merryweather.

            Despite how she was exuding a very kind air, I leaned away. It might have to do with the fact that she was smiling a bit too forcefully.

            “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to come with me,” Merrweather said, reaching a hand out to help me off my ass. I didn’t take it. “Ma’am, please, don’t make this any harder than it needs to be.”

            “Where are we?” I demanded, still refusing her hand.  Her face went from slightly irritated to calm in a few seconds of concentration on her part.

            “We’re in Diagon Alley,” she told me, voice going soft as though I were a wild animal needing to be calmed down. “I’ll explain more later, but we really need to go.”

            The moment my hand touched hers, we were swept away in a tunnel of fuck-I’m-going-to-vomit.

            (I did indeed vomit the moment the world became corporeal and my body didn’t feel like it was being stretched like playdough, right onto Merryweather’s shoes. Ha.)

            “What-“ I coughed, retching and leaning away from the vomit-covered heels. Merryweather was frowning in disgust, her façade of kindness swept away by a cold, impenetrable look. “The fuck? Was that?”

            “Disapparition,” Merryweather said simply, pulling a stick from her sleeve and waving it at her shoes. The vomit was sucked away by an invisible blackhole. I gaped at where it had been, mouth tasting like shitty public education lunch, hair falling into my face.

            “What the fuck,” I whispered, letting myself fall to the ground where I pressed my cheek into the cold floor. Merryweather didn’t appear impressed.

            “Get up, we haven’t time for this,” she ordered.

            Before she could leave me behind, I scrambled to follow her. As much as this woman rubbed me wrong in the few minutes I knew her, she was the only connection I had so far.

            The nondescript room we had…disapparated into was about the size of a lunch table, completely black with no windows and no discernible light source, yet perfectly well lit. One door was the only exit and Merryweather led us through it, despite there being no doorknob, into a stadium-sized room, circular with doors lining the walls and filled with people going to and fro, paper airplanes flying through the air on a mission. There was an eclectic mix of people dressed similarly to Merryweather amongst everyone else. Those not dressed in the purple-and-gold ensemble wore hooded nightgowns of soul-sucking black, faces covered in masks of the same color with no facial features or eyeholes to speak of, moving eerily silent about.

            I realized belatedly that I had been staring and Merryweather was far away now. I chased after her, backpack bouncing uncomfortably on my back, cell clenched in hand. Pushing through throngs of people, I noticed with shock that everyone dressed like Merryweather had a badge that also read Merrweather.

            Merryweather – the one who had whisked me away from Diagon Alley – stopped at a door to wait for me. I was gasping for breath as I finally reached her, hands planted on my knees and bent over. It hadn’t seemed that far of a run, but yet I felt like I had been ordered to run more than a lap in gym.

            “Do try to keep up,” Merrweather said in a bored tone that spoke of hidden derision for my entire being.

            I glared venomously at her back as she stalked through the door and down a corridor.

            It was a while before we stopped walking, in and out of doors and more hallways than I’d ever been through, leaving me so thoroughly confused I wouldn’t have been able to point you to a single place I’d been . Our last stop was what looked like a detention room, or an interrogation room but without the one-way mirror and decidedly more stone-built than steel. The table in the middle of it had two chairs, and standing in a corner was one of the people with a faceless. I shivered, despite not knowing if they were actually watching me.

            Merryweather motioned for me to sit as she took a stack of files and a…feather quill from the faceless person.

            “Let’s begin,” she spoke, opening a file to a black piece of tan-colored…parchment? “What is your name?”

            I didn’t answer instantly, simply watching as she set the quill over the parchment, let go, and saw that it stood poised to write without her help, labeling a new option; _Name:_

            “Aubrey Sackville,” I made up on the spot, damned if I was going to give her my real name. Dutifully, the quill copied it down in swirling script.

            Merryweather raised a brow as if she knew I was lying to her. “How old are you, Miss Sackville?”

“Seventeen,” I told her. “My birthday-“

“I don’t need to know that,” Merryweather interrupted. “What is the date?”

            “January 30th, 2017,” I answered honestly, glancing between the quill, Merryweather, and the silent person. “What’s going on?”

            “All in due time, Miss Sackville,” Merryweather said calmly, putting her hands on the table to rest her chin on. “Now, tell me about your day.”

            Everything I said, the quill copied down in a section it titled ‘ _activity prior to displacement_ ’ which was a well enough descriptor to what had happened. I had been quite displaced. Merryweather would intervene with a clarifying question every now and then, about the oddest things like what exactly I ate for breakfast, how many pages I read in my civics textbook, and so on. In the corner, the faceless person watched this all silently, not moving an inch, despite it going on long enough that I was getting fidgety with the need to take a piss.

            When my voice began to become hoarse from speaking, Merryweather finally ended it.

            “Alright,” she nodded, and the quill began a new line titled _‘current date,’_ “Today is not January 30 th, 2017, Miss Sackville. Today is February 13th, 1989.”

            “Nah,” I shook my head, scooting my chair back with a screech. “You’re nutzo. This whole fucking situation is nutzo. I’m probs just passed out on the classroom floor and any minute I’m going to wake up…any…minute…”

            I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes so hard I saw stars in the blackness, quietly counting my breaths as I waited to wake up.

            After giving me a few minutes to freak out, Merryweather coughed to regain my attention. I refused to look.

            “Miss Sackville, as much as I would like for you to be in the time you were in a few hours ago,” had it been that long? “it is unfortunately the year of 1989. You are not the first to be temporally displaced, and the Department is looking into the situation.”

            I took a deep breath and pulled my hands away, squinting at Merryweather, who looked like she pitied me but not enough to try and comfort me. “Explain. Please.”

            Merryweather moved the parchment file and the quill to the side to open the next one, handing me a pamphlet on actual paper that read, _So You’ve Time Traveled_ with a depiction of a person screaming into a whirlwind that tried to suck them up. I swallowed. _Awesome._

            “I believe I should begin with the fact that magic is real,” Merryweather said, shattering every thought going through my head, following it up with a sucker punch to the brain, “and that you’re a witch.”

            The expletives that left my mouth had Merryweather’s neutral face turn into a scowl.

            “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, hands gripping my thick, dark red hair in clumps that were definitely going to fall out the moment I pulled my hands out. “You’ve got to be fucking _joking_.”  
            “I am not, Miss Sackville, in the habit of joking about this,” Merryweather said, sounding quite irritated at the situation.

            The situation that apparently included time travel and magic. Because that happened.

            “For the past decade there have been temporal displacements into the wizarding world,” continued Merryweather, as though she hadn’t just ruined my entire world view and caused an existational crisis. “You are the seventh. As far as we know, there is no way for you to return to your time period, and thus, we have begun integrating displaced witches and wizards into normal magical society. This has proved difficult seeing as every displaced witch or wizard reported no previous knowledge of the wizarding world, of magic. The Department of Mysteries has been equipped to house and teach you until you are sufficiently knowledgable in the time period to survive in society. For now, I and Unspeakable Pickkery here,” she motioned to the faceless dude, “will be your handlers and teachers.”

            I held up a hand to stop her, and she sighed. “So. You’re telling me that I can never go home? That I’m stuck more than 20 years in the past? Forever?”

            ‘Until the Department reaches a conclusion on the cause of temporal displacements and finds a solution to the situation,” Merryweather rolled her eyes. “Yes.”

            “Oh, if that’s all,” I replied, hysterical. “Holy shit. Holy _shit,_ I want my mom.”

            My mother was fucking ten years old right now.

Unspeakable Pickkery eventually escorted me to a room – through a door that hadn’t been there before – off to the side of the detention room that housed a bed, a wardrobe, a desk, and a door that most likely led to a bathroom. They had a hard trouble getting me there as I had been crying into my hands and unmovable as Merryweather  left me to my tears with a sigh of annoyance.

            I eventually ended up dumping my bag next to the bed, crawling under the blankets with my shoes on, and passing out.

            Sleep didn’t care for me, my dreams turning to nightmares and I woke up more than once crying for my parents and my siblings.

-/

            The following weeks were hell. Every morning consisted of Merryweather dragging my ass out of bed and throwing me into the shower fully clothed and spraying me with cold water when I refused to do anything. She would then cast a warming charm, with her magic wand, to dry me and drag me into the Detention Room where she would attempt to lecture me about the history of the world I now inhabited.

            When it became apparent that I was unresponsive and not listening, usually an hour into the lesson, Merryweather would throw me back into my room.

            With the door locked behind me, I felt it safe to go through my backpack. My planner was always open on my desk, days crossed off that turned into weeks. In my time period, I had been gone for almost two months. I had read and reread my textbooks and such front to back multiple times, done many of the inbook exercises, and finished all the homework I had been putting off during school.

            I didn’t open the wardrobe aside from once, just to stare at the nightgown-like clothing Merryweather called robes in silence.

            Three times a day, Unspeakable Pickkery brought me food. I ate in silence in the Detention Room whilst they stared at me. Even though they were creepy as shit and never said a word, I felt happier in their presence than I did Merryweather’s, who was more likely to snark at me to try and get me to do shit. I wanted nothing to do with this world, only wanted to go home.

            But it was getting boring.

            My nightmares had long since turned into dreams of longing. Now and then I had to catch myself from opening the pamphlet that I hadn’t touched since that first, fateful day. I had grieved for my family and life in a way that I had never grieved for anyone else in the world – I had grieved for myself, an identity that was gone and dead. Sticking to the name I had first given, not a single soul truly knew who I was. I had never existed to anyone here aside as Aubrey Sackville.

            And Aubrey Sackville was getting bored.

            I gave in.

            When Merryweather woke me up by ripping the blankets off me, I rolled out of bed instantly instead of laying still, waiting for her to levitated me into the shower. Merryweather, who clearly had not expected this, looked very wrongfooted for a moment before schooling her features with a glare.

            “You couldn’t have decided to get on with your life months ago?” she huffed, crossing her arms.

            I shrugged, going over to the wardrobe to grab one of those robes from it and frowned. There was nothing to wear under it.

            “Traditionally robes are the only clothes you would wear,” Merryweather spoke, as those reading my thoughts. “We would have been able to update your wardrobe to your liking, had you actually spoken to us about it.”

            “Fuck you,” I whispered, my throat aching from lack of use.

            “Language,” Merryweather retorted, turning to stalk out the door. “I’ll be waiting.”

            I took my sweet-ass time in the shower, lathering and rinsing and generally waiting until my fingers pruned and steam filled the bathroom before I got out. Ringing my hair, which had grown a few inches further down my back, I stood naked in front of the mirror. I had lost weight, and it didn’t do me well. My blue eyes looked almost listless aside from a small spark of life in them and I saw my hipbones jutting out in a way that I’d never seen them do before, having always been a bit plush in my life.

            The robe had fitted wrists and a stiff collar that reached up my neck compared to the loose fabric it was made up of, billowing around my waist as I slipped it on. As soon as my head had stretched through the collar, it tightened to fit my neck perfectly. There were no shoes in the wardrobe, but there were thick, black wool socks that I slipped on gratefully.

            Merryweather and Unspeakable Pickkery were waiting in the Detention Room with breakfast.

            “Finally,” said Merryweather sharply, motioning for me to sit and eat. “Today we’ll give you a crash course in magical world history up to the 19th century. Tomorrow we’ll start on the magical history of America, followed by the magical history of Europe, and then we’ll worry about your practical skills.”

            I nodded like I knew what she was talking about, mouth full of pancakes that tasted like they had been cut out of paper.

            This was going to be a bitch and  a half, wasn’t it.

-/

            Magical history was quite interesting, actually. I almost felt sorry that I hadn’t been actually able to go to Ilvermorny back in my time, but as Merryweather explained, whatever had caused the temporal displacements led to the displaced activating a magical gene that lay dormant in us. When Merryweather’s history lessons turned to Hogwarts, I was excited at the prospect of attendind – that is, until Merryweather explained that the magical age of maturity was 17 and thus I couldn’t attend.

            “It’s for the best, actually,” she said. “It’s a bloody hassle to try and integrate the displaced into school systems, much easier to simply train them in the Department until they’re sufficient.”

            That was what they had meant by practical lessons, apparently.

            Merryweather took on teaching me potions, transfiguration, and everything else any basic witch of my age should know how to do. Pickkery taught me Astronomy, Charms, and Arithmancy, which was apparently something most displaced from the future were able to do quite well. Probably because it was so math intensive.

            They brought in a French woman to get me a wand, too – she was dressed like Merryweather and also had a badge reading that name. I decided to call her Madame M. instead, which caused Madame M. to laugh and Merryweather to passive-aggressively quiz me in potions the next week or so. I ended up with a wand of redwood, the same color as my hair almost, 13 ¾” long, with a unicorn hair core, supple flexibility, suited towards transfiguration.

            At first, it was hard to get used to, using a wand and actually learning stuff outside theoretical spell casting. Merrweather was a slave-driver, though, not giving me an inch to waste time with.

            Lessons that went on every day, most of the day, ended abruptly seven months in, towards the end of December. According to Merryweather, I know knew the bare minimum of any Hogwarts graduate, and thus she gave me a backstory, helped me pack my bags, and took me to my new home.

            I had an apartment in Unicorn Call, apparently, a small wizarding town about an hour away from Diagon Alley by taxi. It was above a flower shop, had one bedroom, a living room, a small kitchen, and a bathroom. My single trunk, given to me by Unspeakable Pickkery, which was filled with the robes I had been wearing the past year and the books I’d been learning from, barely filled half of the bookshelf and wadrobe at my disposal.

            Merryweather had even gotten me a job in Diagon at a thrift store. I worked weekdays 8-6 for one galleon an hour. It was up to me whether or not I set up a bank account, and what I did with my time outside of work was my own business, but Merryweather and Pickkery would visit once a month to check up on me and do tests.

            And suddenly, at the dawn of 1990, I was on my own.

            Hell, I was eighteen now, wasn’t I?

-/

            My life following my release from the Department of Mysteries was incredibly boring. I went to work every day I could, I set  up a bank account that I never really touched outside of grocery shopping or buying books to learn from. Merryweather and Pickkery’s visits were the highlight of my life, sometimes.

            I was so boring, apparently, that Merryweather told me to get a life.

            I decided to buy a cat.

            This was how I ended up in Surrey, England, in the middle of June, at the house of Arabella Figg, looking at a litter of half-kneazles.

            This was how I met Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived.

-/

            Unlike many witches and wizards, I had an advantage in passing for a non-magical person, as I had been one for most of my life. I didn’t go to Privet Drive dressed in head-to-toe purple or green like some, or wearing clothes from the 1920’s. I wore a pair of scuffed, high-waisted, boyfriend jeans, sneakers, a white crop top under a jean jacket with the sleeves rolled up, and my hair in a ponytail. My wand was hidden in a pocket on the inside of my jacket and I wore circular sunglasses and hoop earrings.

            Arabella, as the woman had asked me to call her through the Floo, was babysitting a boy unaware of magic today and thus had asked me to take the Knight Bus to a nearby street and walk the rest of the way. Hopefully by the time I was done, the kid would be gone and I could floo back.

            Arabella lived in Number Three, and as I bounded up the steps towards the front door, I could see in the window cats lounging. Nice.

            However, when I knocked, Arabella wasn’t the one who answered.

            Instead, it was a little boy with dark skin, wild black hair, bright green eyes behind large glasses, and a scar that scraped across his forehead like a lightning bolt. We stared at each other in silence, him probably confused and me horrified.

            One of the few things Merryweather and Pickkery had forced on me as a rule was to not get involved with anyone already in a history book.

            Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, was one of those people. But he stood in front of me, dressed in clothes far too big for his size, and glasses held together by tape.

            “Who’re you?” he demanded in a snotty voice that most ten year olds had by default.

            “Who’re _you_?” I shot back at him, despite knowing his name.

            We glared at each other until Arabella bumbled up to the door with a smile. “Harry, dear, why are you holding Aubrey up at the door? Let her in, please, she’s here to see Snowball’s litter.”

            As if Arabella had shocked reality back into Potter, the kid blinked and looked sheepish, ducking his head and stepping aside for me. I squeezed past him, not daring to touch him lest I break the space-time-continuum somehow, I followed Arabella into the kitchen. I could hear Potter watching TV in the living room.

            Snowball was a grey-furred Siberian kitty who had had kittens with a bright orange kneazle named Billius, who Arabella seemed to find the most amusing of her brood. Out of the six kittens snuggled up to Snowball’s belly, suckling at her for milk, the one who stood out the most to me was a orange tabby with the same build as Snowball, but unlike one of its littermates, no smooshed face. Arabella only asked for three galleons for the little tom, who I still had yet to name.

            She also asked that I stay for tea, as apparently not many from the wizarding world like to socialize with squibs and she was quite lonely. Potter ended up joining us as we ate dry, chocolate cake in the dining room.

            It was awkward. Potter was quiet, I was quiet, and Arabella wanted to chatter like no tomorrow. Eventually, though, she got Potter talking about school and what he was learning – something about the history of England bridges? I didn’t get it, but nodded along, pulling some miscellaneous facts about America whenever they seemed relevant.

            It was after Harry – as he’d said to call him – had left that I was able to escape as well.

            I ended up named the kitten Merryweather, Merry for short.

            Merryweather adored Merry, which was the opposite of what I had wanted, but whatever.

            I didn’t tell her about meeting Harry Potter. I didn’t tell her that Arabella had invited me back over for tea, again and again, and that Harry was almost always there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Later it would turn out that the temporal displacements were caused by Quirrel trying to get Voldemort his old body back through time magic and when Harry killed the guy, Aubrey was put in a coma with all the other displacements. Harry and co. would find her and the others in a stasis charmed room in the DoM during their search for the Prophecy in OoTP, and they wouldn’t ever get answers about the room until after the war whilst Hermione was cleaning up the Ministry through force. Harry would fondly remember the days at Mrs. Figg’s, drinking tea whilst this foreigner made bad jokes and swore a lot. They would never wake up, and later the DoM would let them die by magically pulling the plug. At the funeral, Harry only recognizes Mrs. Figg, not the woman named Merryweather (like Aubrey’s cat, Harry would note) and the Unspeakable. In her will, which Aubrey had written a few months into 1991, Aubrey leaves Merryweather her cat (if still alive, which he is), Pickkery her wand, Mrs. Figg her favorite tea set, and Harry a photo album filled with pictures of Merry messing around in her apartment, Aubrey and Harry playing around at Figg’s (which Mrs. Figg admitted to capturing, after seeing the album tearfully) and other photos.


	5. foggy thoughts of determined minds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I failed, she thinks without reason and then pretends like she doesn’t know what she failed at. Like she doesn’t somehow know that Voldemort was alive because of her failure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Idk I've been trying to only work on my Naruto fic "sepia-toned" right now but it's so hard to not write other stuff at the same time. I'll also be honest when I say I churned this out while I was stoned so I'm not completely sure how good it is, I didn't get a beta for this. Hope you enjoy it!

Hermione often has nightmares. It’s one of the strange things about her, like the posh, upper class accent she has compared to her parents quite regular english accents. They, the nightmares, are terrible; drawn out and usually to leave her screaming in her sleep, waking her parents at all hours. From what she’s been told, she was even worse as an infant. She can barely ever remember the dreams, but what she can remember is more than enough. 

The feeling of dozens of hands grappling at her, ripping and tearing and pulling her apart at the seams. The choking, breathless feeling of water filling her lungs, her chest tight as blood stops flowing from her brain. Tiny, broken sobs calling out for her before cutting off with a sharp crack.

Those are almost the most mundane ones. She tries not to let it get to her. 

If she wakes up with a forgotten name on her tongue and a sense of grief, she doesn’t say. If she zones out at the breakfast table and half-mindedly turns to tell her brother something before blinking and remembering she doesn’t have a brother, she doesn’t say. If she reaches out often for affection from her parents because she has a foggy certainty that it’s something she’s never had and should be treasured, she doesn’t say. If it takes her a half-second too long to respond to her own name, she doesn’t say.

So yes, she tries not to let it get to her. Instead she dives into learning and reading because,  _ wow,  _ who knew such amazing things could exist like cars? Or airplanes? Or walkmans? Libraries - public ones and not ones hoarded away in secret? And not just that but things like biology, chemistry, engineering, literature, mathematics… There was so much the world had to offer and Hermione couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all so new and wondrous! And maybe the other kids at school called her names and such, but it wasn’t the worst thing Hermione had dealt with before, and her classmates were all incredibly immature anyways.

Of course, then the her magic showed itself.

How Hermione was certain that it was magic, she didn’t know. In fact, it could have been entirely written off as a coincidence, a gust of wind. The page of her book had certainly not moved on its own to turn, she had either  forgotten turning it or a breeze had blown it over. Right? Wrong. Hermione didn’t know how she knew, but she knew.

It was Accidental Magic, and she told her parents as such. She was a Witch and at one point, she couldn’t quite remember, she would have to go to magic school for it.

They didn’t believe her, but she forgave them because she  _ is _ only eight and who believes an eight year old about anything? Sometimes she can hardly believe herself, the things she comes up with. 

Still, this revelation that she was, indeed, a witch left her reeling. Somehow, the sense that she could be a witch with non-magical parents seemed odd. But then, what else could she be? She was a witch, and she had non-magical parents.  _ Muggle _ parents, and the word initially brings revulsion up her throat. She grappled with the thoughts churning in her head for days before settling that maybe, once upon a time she’s forgotten, it would have been odd, but change was natural. It was a truth, that nothing stays the same, so why couldn’t she have muggle parents and still be a witch?

It feels like something has settled with this realization. Some of the nightmares lessen in frequency after this.

Nevertheless, Hermione begins training her magic. She can’t get her wand yet, not that she remembers why, so she’ll have to train like a complete novice. Which she is, she thinks belatedly, so of course she’d be training like this. There’s a lot of meditation and searching for her magical core to get a feel for it; she goes often to the library but finds that reading a beginners book on pagan witchcrafts shakes loose the remnants of a memory, knowledge she can’t believe she’s forgotten! Of course she already knows about magic, it just took some reminding! Hermione continues going to the library, of course, because you never pass up free knowledge.

Her core is different, somehow. Or maybe it’s not, and that’s the problem. It’s exactly as it ever has been, completely normal for an eight year old muggleborn witch. But somehow it’s not what she was expecting and she can’t quite figure out what she  _ was  _ expecting. How strange. She moves forward and practices and does the exercises she knows somehow to do and continues growing.

When she’s eleven, she gets her Hogwarts letter, hand-delivered by the Deputy Headmistress, Professor Minerva McGonagall. Hermione knows her name before the woman even introduces herself.

It is the first time she’s met someone she feels like she already knows. It is also the first time Hermione realizes just how odd she is for knowing these things that she shouldn’t, necessarily, know.

They go to Diagon Alley - and for a moment she’s struck with shock that she’s been driving past the Leaky Cauldron before without realizing, but how could she have known what the Muggle-side entrance looked like? Following that, she realized, how could she know what the magical side looked like? The question follows her into the Alley and throughout the trip with her parents to buy her school supplies. When she gets her wand, Ollivander hums and haws over her and the increasingly growing pile of failed wands for nearly two hours before finding the right combination. Aspen wood, 9 and ½ inches long, with a dragon heartstring core, supple. Well suited for Defense, or maybe Charms, Ollivander had said.

Hermione tries to ignore how more at ease she feels here, surrounded by robed and cloaked figures, than she’s ever felt walking down a street with muggles. 

It’s reading through her history books that she learns of You-Know-Who. That’s all the books refer to him as, and they all say he was killed by a baby in 1980. Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived. Hermione wonders what sort of magical ability a baby could have to defeat someone said to be so powerful. Then, after a night of nightmares and waking up  _ knowing _ the Dark Lord Voldemort, she wonders even more. But she’s also relieved, because the Dark Lord is  _ dead _ and she’s certain he can’t come back. (She made sure of it, but she can’t remember  _ how. _ )

As the first of September draws near, she realizes that she’s going to have to be Sorted. Somehow, she thought she’d already been, but couldn’t remember when or into what House. But she remembered how you got Sorted, and if the Sorting Hat was going to look into her head she wanted it to be a settled head. 

So she sat down and tried to figure out what was wrong with her. 

The only answers she could come up with - aside from something outlandish like having the knowledge erased from her brain as a baby, but who Obliviates a baby? How would a baby know all that stuff, anyways? - is that she’s either a reincarnation of a magical person, or that she’s a Seer. She goes with the former, remembering all the times she thought half-mindedly about a brother she didn’t have.

And then she goes to Hogwarts. 

She sits in a compartment with a tall boy with dark hair and a familiar composure, slipping easily into habits she can’t remember forming. Polite nods are exchanged and she opens a book on advanced transfiguration theory to be engrossed in for the rest of the ride. At the end of the ride, neither of them are scrambling to change as they had come in their school robes. They part ways easily and without learning each other’s names.

On the boat ride, she sits in a boat with a boy named Neville Longbottom -  _ pureblood _ , she thinks instantly.  _ Practically a blood traitor, but not quite there yet. _ \- who cries about his Toad being missing. She tells him he should simply  _ accio _ the toad back if he’s so worried, and then has to teach him the incantation and wand movements. He does horribly and fails five times, long enough that her patience has worn thin and she simply summons the toad herself. 

She doesn’t miss the looks from the kids who look like the boy on the train, shifty eyes and perfect postures. Hermione curses herself for being so blatant but can’t find it in her to be sorry. In fact, a part of her wants to smirk defiantly at them.

When her name is called to be Sorted, she walks with composure. She does not quiver or hesitate, no matter how much she wants to, and lets the wide brim of the Sorting Hat obscure her sight.

“ _ Why, back again, are you? _ ” It’s accent-less voice asked. “ _ Well, this is quite unusual, but I don’t believe I’m  _ not _ not allowed to Sort you again. How interesting! Well, let’s see. Not Slytherin again - definitely not. Not Hufflepuff, no… Ravenclaw, maybe… _ ”

Her thoughts drift back to Gryffindor, which she had felt very drawn to whilst reading Hogwarts: A History. It reminded her of someone she didn’t know. 

“ _Oh, yes, qutie a bit of courage…_ ” The Hat continues rambling for quite some time. “ _Yes, yes, I think that’ll do it! It’ll have to be_ GRYFFINDOR!”

Somehow the thought she’d be sorted into the House of lions had never occurred to her. Now, sitting surrounded by red and gold, it’s her new reality. 

Of course, people don’t seem magically like her now that she’s a witch. In fact, it makes quite a few people  _ dis _ like her, especially in Slytherin. Draco Malfoy in particular takes joy in taunting her, something that sets off a mixture of pride and irritation in her, strangely. He looks familiar. Any of the Slytherins who don’t hate her treat her like a bizarre magical creature, like her behavior is fascinating. 

There aren’t many people in her House who like her, either. She was too bookish and ‘stuck up’ for her dorm-mates, and any time she tried to help anyone with class work she was pushed aside and insulted. Neville Longbottom, who had somehow managed to be Sorted into Gryffindor despite his entire…  _ self _ , had latched on to her. Unfortunately she’s strapped for friends, and unless Harry Potter, who has thus been indifferent to her, decides to de-latch from Ronald Weasley, the absolute git, he’d be her first choice. 

Halloween comes and Hermione finds herself avoiding the Great Hall, despite the Feast. Weasley had been especially rude today and Hermione was quite tired with the boy’s attitude. The idea of sitting near him for the entirety of a Feast was the furthest thing from a good time as possible. So instead she sets up shop in an empty girls’ bathroom and starts to read about runic sequences in conjecture to numerical values. Sometimes people pop in, on their way to the Feast, but none stay for long after exchanging a few words with her. 

The troll is a bit more of a surprise.

She’s about to try out a half-remembered curse, one she’s certain will get her expelled for using but she’s prepared to argue that it was a life-or-death situation because  _ it is _ , when Potter and Weasley burst through the bathroom door. They’re also a bit of a surprise. 

Hermione can’t do Dark magic with them there, so she’s stuck with no ideas. Thankfully, they seem to sort themselves out and with some shouted encouragement (aka screamed orders) Weasley is able to levitate the club and drop it on the troll’s head, knocking him out. Both she and Weasley help drag Potter out from under the troll.

Somehow she ends up covering for them. 

Somehow she ends up calling them Harry and Ron instead of Potter and Weasley.

It’s like becoming their friend opened the floodgates. In between learning magic and reluctantly continuing her friendship with Neville, Hermione is dragged into a conspiracy involving Dumbledore, Nicholas Flamel, and Snape. She has no doubts that Snape is trying to get the Philosopher’s Stone, but not for Harry’s reasoning that Voldemort is still alive and just weak; she knows with a remembered certainty that Snape is cruel and vicious, just as she had been before she knew the love of Jean and Robert Granger, and she knows what she would have done if given the chance of such an item.

It’s all the more terrible when Harry explains later, in the Hospital Wing before the End of Year Feast, that Voldemort  _ is _ alive and had been in the school the entire year on the back of Quirrel’s head.

_ I failed _ , she thinks without reason and then pretends like she doesn’t know what she failed at. Like she doesn’t somehow know that Voldemort was alive because of her failure.

Failure at what task, she couldn’t remember. But somehow she was the cause for all of this. For the Flamels having to die now, for Harry’s torment, for Ron’s injuries from the Chess Board. It was all her fault. 

She goes home despondent and glum. Nothing her parents try can cheer Hermione up. It doesn’t help that all of her letters to Harry are left with no replies, though it helps that Ron says Harry is ignoring him as well. 

Hermione’s parents take a vacation to France for the year. 

Apparently they had been slowly taking advantage of the Ministry’s enforced conversion rates of Galleon to pound. In the Muggle world, a galleon was simply a pound of gold in a coin-shape ready to be sold at hundreds of British pounds to the ounce. To the Ministry of Magic, it was worth five pounds. Her parents, Hermione decided, were devious. They were set up in savings for more than a lifetime. 

The trip to France is luxurious and full of activities. Her favorite parts are when they visit the magical areas of France, and she buys so many new books. When they get back, she gets a letter from Ron and Harry - both sharing the same piece of paper and their handwriting mixes together in some parts - that tell her about their daring escape/rescue at Number Four Privet Drive and the tale of a House Elf stealing mail.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it ends abruptly, I just wanted to sleep at that point. Probably not going to continue this so here's the premise: Hermione is Regulus Black reborn because I HC that Regulus died early January because all the wikia says is it was in 1979 and Hermione was born that year soooo. Yeah. Not sure where I'd take it.
> 
> Comment if you'd like. If you want to use my ideas and such, go for it just drop a link to the fic in the comments.


	6. Hermione Granger: Witch Abroad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry Potter/Kiki's Delivery Service crossover I never got to actually finishing.

Hermione stands in the doorway to the living room, silently watching her parents. They haven’t noticed her yet, caught up in their laughter as they watch an episode of  _ I Love Lucy _ . 

Her mother, Jean, was sprawled across her father’s lap, head resting on the arm of the couch and her feet thrown over the back of it. Hermione can see the chipped blue polish on her toenails and the small, faded star tattoo Hermione had always found fascinating. Her mom always made up wild stories about where and when she’s gotten it, each one crazier than the last, and Hermione could remember listening to the stories at bedtime, falling asleep to her mum’s voice. As if summoned by the memory, Jean speaks.

“Darling, we should go to France again,” she says excitedly. “I know we went last summer, but Hermione seemed to really love it, and it was so gorgeous…”

Her father, Robert, who had been amusing himself by playing with her hair, said, “I agree, but maybe later this summer? We could go for a week, take some time off at the Office and get Hermione out of the house for a few days.”

Hermione smiled, and felt tears well up in her eyes. She was so lucky to have her parents, who both encouraged her adoration of reading as well as helped her spend more time outside. They were always so concerned over her, how she was doing with making friends, if she was happy…

_ It’s my turn to be the one who worries _ , Hermione thought, the smile fading from her lips. 

It had taken her until the middle of June to be prepared for this. Days of sneaking away to Diagon Alley on her own for research, dozens of letters to various departments in the Ministry - and all of it had stemmed from the events of her second year at Hogwarts.

Hermione could still remember waking up in the Hospital Wing, Madam Promfrey and Professor McGonagall standing over her with relieved expressions. It had barely felt like waking at all, more like the world had moved beneath her feet between one blink and the next, terror still pounding in her heart at the glimpse of yellow,  _ acidic _ eyes in that small mirror. She had let the Professors talk at her for as long as they wanted, her mind far away. 

The Wizarding World was full of prejudice, prejudice she had thought wouldn’t truly be a problem. With magic being  _ real _ she had thought witches and wizards would be above such disagreements. Unfortunately not. And if she, who was at the top of her grade, could be targeted for just being a Muggleborn… Hermione feared what would happen to her parents. Malfoy’s voice rang her head every time she thought about it, screaming of  _ mudbloods _ and a hateful look in his eyes.

The idea that had come to her while she was half asleep the night after being revived from the basilisk’s petrification was outlandish. Hare-brained, even. But it stuck with her through the night and the next day, and then the next, and the next, until she had become so accustomed to it that it actually seemed viable. 

_ What if I sent them away? _

Learning the Obliviate spell had been easy. Magic had always come to her easily, but Hermione practiced every day until the end of term. She only had one chance to do it and she couldn’t mess up, so Hermione went over the spell until she could do the wand motions in her sleep. Lavender had complained about seeing her waving her arm around in her sleep, so Hermione knew she could do it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My plan for this fic was: Hermione does the whole oblivate-send to australia-disappearing act a lot sooner than 1997. The way I was going to get around the whole "Hermione isn't an adult and can't do magic outside of school bit" was apply for emancipation in the Ministry of Magic. I assume the process goes smoother when the parent's are seemingly in agreement and I was going to have her trick them into signing the papers whilst they were half asleep. Then I was going to send her on a Kiki-like adventure for the summer, where she'd hopefully meet Remus before he becomes a teacher and so they'd be friends. 
> 
> Comment if you'd life. If you'd like to use this idea for your story, go ahead! Just drop a link to your fic in the comments.


	7. obligatory naruto has a twin sister drabble

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> not much longer than the last, sorry

There is nothing that sobers you faster than death. 

She comes into the world screaming and dizzy, her mind reeling from the sudden, instant shift from  _ blitzed-out-of-her-mind _ to  _ cold-aware-awake _ . Her skin is burning with an itch even as she shivers in the cold air. The last thing she remembers is the glinting eyes of a possum in headlights as her equally fucked-up friend swore and slammed on the brakes, attempting to swerve around the animal. As she’s shuffled from large hands to large hands she tries to remember more, but all she can piece together is a feeling of weightlessness and the screeching of metal on metal.

_ I was in a car accident _ . She realizes, wailing to the world the pain that laces under her skin and throbs in her head.  _ Is this a hospital? _

No, it isn’t. It shouldn’t be possible to hold her entire body in the palm of someone’s hands, but that is exactly what is happening as another set of hands pull at her arms and legs, checking her over and eventually wrapping her in a warm blanket. Someone else is screaming, but she’s only just noticed now that she’s quieted, and it gets louder as she is placed in someone’s arm, another bundle pressed against her.

The infant who wasn’t opened her eyes and used all six inches of visibility she had to peer at an infant next to her. It had a shock of hair dampened to a dark brown stuck to its head, face bright red as it screamed, three straight black lines on each of its cheeks. Despite being an infant, it wasn’t small. Instead it was the same size as she.

Or, it slowly dawns on her, she is as small as it.

It is no sooner than she’s gotten to this conclusion that the screams in the room increase, an unfortunate adult quality to them as one by one they are cut off. The arms around her and the other infant tighten to the point it hurts to breathe, the person holding them struggling against another - her vision is obscured by red and white on a black background. The infant next to her is ripped away with a ferocity that she wants to recoil from and - 

The world is set on fire.

She screams and screams and screams as the itch underneath her skin and in her head transforms into what must be fire lacing its way through her and on her skin. The world around her disappears as her own screams are hidden under the earth-shattering roar of something other. Whoever is holding her tumbles off the bed they were laying on and - with legs that shake so much she can feel their tremble - runs.

\---

 

The world isn’t on fire anymore and her entire being throbs in pain dulled from all-consuming to levels she can ignore. The arms that had been cradling her tightly this entire time are gone and she lays on the cold ground, once more next to the infant from before. It is still crying, but no longer does it have a blanket. With a throat sore and silent, she takes in the ink-black design on the boy’s stomach before glancing up and away. Even with him screaming it is almost quiet without the roaring.

Two blurs, one bright yellow and one crimson red, bracket them. The ground is growing moist, soaking through her blanket, and it smells like iron. 

The world is not quiet, she realizes as exhaustion creeps upon her. In the distance she can hear screams.

The two blurs whisper to each other, to the infant, to her. She doesn’t understand what they’re saying. 

 

\---

 

Her world exists inside a crib. She knows the patterns of the quilt under her like the back of her hand, can see the baby blue eyes of the other infant behind her closed eyes with as much detail as if hers were open. The only things that change are the people who come to feed them, always dressed in black and white armor with masks covering their faces, and the old man that sometimes visits. 

It’s in this crib that she mourns her own life. It wasn’t much of one, she’ll admit, but the connections to the people around her, the people she loved, can never be replaced. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comment if you'd like. Feel free to use whatever ideas you find here for your own stuff, just please drop a link to your stuff in the comments.


	8. Escapism At Its Finest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Twilight Saga/The Magicians crossover. 15th timeline.

A car door slams in the distance. Bella knows it’s Charlie’s cruiser, and listens as the engine turns on and the car sputters off towards the Police Department. She doesn’t move, hasn’t moved more than an inch since Charlie woke her up from another nightmare an hour earlier. It’s almost time for first period to begin, and Bella knows that she should get up, get ready, get to class.

She can’t do it. 

Months of getting up, rolling out of bed, going to class - none of it makes her feel any better. It’s like she’s just going through the motions while the hole in her heart left by  _ them _ gets wider and wider every minute. Today it hits her especially hard. 

She knows why, too. Tomorrow, it’ll have been a year since she moved to Forks. Tomorrow, it’ll have been a year since she didn’t know  _ him _ . In two days, it’ll be a year since she met  _ him _ . Maybe if she can just exist on the 15th of January for the rest of her life, she’ll never have to pass that milestone. 

No, she thinks to herself. If only she could have existed on September 12th, 2005, for the rest of her days. Just one day before everything went to shit.

Without really knowing why, Bella throws her comforter off. The cool air feels like ice against her skin, like her blanket kept her safe from everything but what was in her head. Bella climbs out of bed, standing like a ghost in the middle of her room, swaying. Why did she get out of bed again? To pee, maybe?

She wanders out of her room and towards the bathroom. While she sits on the toilet, she thinks about a time when she would have called this her “human” moments. All the thought does is make her sigh. 

Since she’s already in the bathroom, she brushes her teeth. Combs her hair, washes her face. She can’t remember the last time she got a haircut, and the locks fall limp and lifeless down her back. There are bags under her eyes still. She thinks they’ll never go away.

Bella steps out of the bathroom and into the hall -  _ wrong _ .

Bella steps out of the bathroom and into a very large dining hall -  _ correct. _

It’s very clearly a dining hall, or a ballroom of some sort, but it’s filled to the brim with people sitting at tables lined up neatly like a classroom. A door closes behind her, and she swings her head around to stare at the large, gold-framed door that was definitely not her home’s bathroom door. The noise reverberates through the room, and Bella can see most of the people have turned to look at her curiously. Some turn away quicker than others and Bella feels like she’s walked into the cafeteria on the 17th of January last year all over again. 

There is a man standing at the front of the room, tall and dark-skinned, a frown on his face. He’s dressed nicely, in a three-piece suit. He’s the only one still watching her.

“Well?” he shouts from across the room. “A few more minutes and you’d have been late. Sit.”

There’s only one table left, at the very end of the row nearest to her. It appears to have originally been used to hold glasses of water, but a butler standing next to it has loaded them all onto a rolling cart. Instead, he places down a blue test booklet and a pencil.

Bella stands there, in the back of the room, for a moment or two longer. She feels out of place in her pajamas, surrounded by people already dressed for the day. Still, she listens to who is clearly the authority of the room and goes to sit. 

On the front of the test booklet is an insignia of a bee with a key, like a crest of a House in some medieval family, or posh British university. There are no words on it aside two: Entrance Exam. 

The man in the front explains the rules. No cheating, no speaking, turn in your booklet when you’re done, and if you need a glass of water, raise three fingers. In total, the testing period was two and a half hours. 

It was almost too much to process. 

But, when the signal to begin was given, Bella flipped open the test booklet and picked up her pencil just like everyone else. 

She finished the test within the first hour, not having looked up at all during that time. All her questions - why did the paper move, the pencil markings move, how was any of this  _ possible _ , and where even  _ was _ she? - were pushed to the back of her mind as she wrote answer after answer after answer until the only page left was filled. Flipping it back over, she rechecked the page count - but suddenly, the only page left was one that said Finished on it. 

Bella looked up, peering around at the tables around her. More than half of them were empty, she realized, at least a hundred people having simply… Vanished. One table, she noted, was almost filled to the brim with glasses of water, the one where a Middle Eastern-looking guy with practically no shirt and a white boy with shoulder-length brown hair sat at. The second boy was still testing, but the other was relaxed in his chair, lifting his hand up again and again to order more glasses. 

She felt somewhat parched as well, looking at the hoard of water. Bella lifted her own hand - and just like that, a glass of water was sat on the table, just out of reach had she flinched and swung at it.

The day only continued to get weirder. 

When all was said and done, and she looked Dean Fogg in the face when he asked her if she had any questions - questions about magic, about the school, about anything - she only had one.

“Do I have to go home, or can I stay here until the school year begins?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a lot of notes on this one lmao.
> 
> Comment if you'd like. Feel free to use ideas from this for your own fics, just drop a link to yours in the comments.


	9. Debts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> OHHC SIOC fic.

Perhaps is was an overreaction, but honestly, who wouldn’t be freaked out if they woke up in a body that wasn’t their own? So I sat there, laying on a small futon mattress in an unfamiliar room, hyperventilating and crying. Rather loudly, too, so if anyone else was in the area, the paper walls of the room wouldn’t do anything to hide the sound. 

I stared down at the hands that shook in another person’s lap. They weren’t tan, but they weren’t pale like my own. The fingers were long and the palms calloused from hard work. I could barely see, my new vision even worse than my own. Slowly, shaking hands reached up to grip at short hair, pulling. The pain of it was shockingly real, a reminder that I wasn’t dreaming. 

Suddenly, the door to the bedroom slammed open and a tall person with long red hair through themself into the room and at me. I froze, not breathing as the tears trickled to a stop as this person wrapped their arms around me, petting a head of hair that wasn’t mine. 

“Haruhi, darling, did you have a nightmare?” the person mumbled, starting to rock me. “I only just got home, are you alright? You aren’t usually aren’t up this early.”

Their words reached me, on the surface completely understandable. When I thought too hard about them, tried to focus on it, suddenly they were foreign and I couldn’t decipher a word. What were they speaking? It sounded like Japanese, almost, but I wasn’t well-versed enough in Asian languages to tell the difference. It could have been Chinese or South Korean for all I knew. 

And yet I had also understood, and the duality of it caused the start of a throb beneath my temples. 

“I…” I started, stopping suddenly at the voice that came from this person’s mouth. 

This person clearly cared about this Haruhi, who I realized suddenly was the person whose body I was inhabiting. What was I supposed to say? What was I supposed to do?

“It’s alright, darling,” the person soothed. “You just lay back and go to sleep. You don’t need to be up for a few hours for school. Get some rest!”

The person pulled away, and I saw their face. Angular, definitively masculine, but covered in a full face of makeup. It was well done, too, not cakey or anything. The person’s hair was long and wavy, and they wore a pretty blue dress and heels. A drag queen? Trans-woman? I didn’t know for sure. I watched them walk away in a daze. 

The screen door closed behind them, but I could hear them moving about. 

What was I supposed to do?

I looked around the room. It was… a bedroom, that’s for sure, nothing truly special about it. A desk to my right, covered in books and notebooks and school supplies. A dresser to my left, organized neatly with an alarm clock on it that showed that it was over half past three in the morning in glowing red lights. A window behind me. 

Crawling out of the futon, I stood. I nearly stumbled, too, because suddenly where I thought the floor should be was not where it was. Closer, I noted; this person was a lot shorter than I was. I went to stand at the window, looking down into a courtyard encased by an apartment building. I could see into the apartment across, the windows dark, only a few I could see with lights on. 

I turned away, looking for a phone. Everyone has a phone, right? And indeed, this person did. Sitting on her dresser was an old, outdated landline. I picked it up and pressed a button, the screen lighting up. Really old, I decided, probably a hand-me-down. The only thing I understood about it, though, were the numbers and the call and hang-up buttons, which were the only things not in a foreign language. I thought about my iPhone 7 at home, with the crack that ran across the screen, and sighed. I dialed my phone number - because surely, if I woke up in this body, they woke up in mine, right? So I dialed.

Dial tone, something so old I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard it. Perhaps in a commercial? I hung up and dialed again, this time my mother’s number, loathe as I was to call her. Nothing. My father’s, my sister’s, my brother’s, my roommates’, my girlfriend’s. All dial tone. Those were the only numbers I knew by heart, and only because I’d had too many times where I’d switched plans and had to change my number. 

I stood in a room unfamiliar to me, in a body not mine, holding someone else’s phone. And I couldn’t even call my parents for help. Closing my eyes, I tried to not cry, to not get the attention of Haruhi’s… roommate. 

Maybe if I went to sleep, I’d wake up back in my body.

\---

The blaring of an alarm rang through my head, only furthering my headache. I groaned, reaching for my phone - only to meet carpet. My mind, foggy with confusion and sleep, tried to process this. I didn’t have carpet, and my bed was high enough off the ground that I shouldn’t be touching it anyhow. Had I fallen asleep at someone else’s house? I couldn’t remember, so if I had, I had probably been drunk out of my mind. 

_ Oh, wait. _ I blinked, rubbing my eyes though that didn’t make my vision any clearer.  _ I remember… _

I sat up in a room that wasn’t mine and felt numb. The smell of bacon wafted through the screen walls. Haruhi’s stomach rumbled in hunger. Someone snored nearby.

I got out of the futon, leaving the room to enter a small hallway with only two rooms to my left and the rest of the apartment to my right. I peeked into the other rooms - the redhead from before was sleeping, despite the clock reading seven in the morning, the other a bathroom. The kitchen down the hall had dishes in the sink and a plate of food left on the counter, still warm. A note sat next to it.

_ Have a wonderful day, darling! Don’t forget your backpack!  _ \-  _ Daddy _

Perhaps the food was good, but as I ate it I tasted nothing. I felt numb, not there, and very cold. Mechanically, I went back to Haruhi’s room and looked through her dresser for clothes. It was only when I had selected them that I realized how much of an invasion of privacy it was for me to be rifling through another person’s things, let alone take their clothes off their body. For a few minutes, I despaired over this.

It was when I saw that it was only thirty minutes to eight that I decided that until I figured this out, normal social etiquette would have to be thrown out the window. Haruhi would understand, surely? I couldn’t feel a dick in the pajama bottoms Haruhi’s body had on, and there were definitely breasts, so unless she was intersex or trans, there wouldn’t be much a difference between us aside size.

There were glasses tucked away in the sock drawer, which I thought odd, but enabled me to see. It was a relief, almost, that Haruhi needed glasses, too. Without them, I would have been reaching to push up a pair instinctively, something many people had found funny when I broke my last pair of glasses. 

Haruhi’s body was so different from mine. Where I was tall and pudgy, she was short and thin as a rail. I marveled at the small size of her breasts for a moment, jealous of how she would never have back pain like me or worry about a shirt being stretched thin. Of course, then I realized what I was doing, flushed pulled on the clothes faster. I dressed quickly in jeans, a white collared shirt, and a dark purple button up cardigan.

Her backpack was by her desk, filled with books already and a pencil case, with a paper map folded on top of it. I unfolded it, and found a piece of paper that, when I read it, (which was as much a headache as listening to the language) showed Haruhi’s class assignment (Class 1-A), her class list, book list, and the school start and end times. 

I blinked at the start time. 8:30 AM. I looked up at the clocked, where 8:20 AM glowed red. 

“Ah, fuck,” I said. 

Why even go to school? I hadn’t been in months after dropping out of college. The name of this school was Ouran Elite Private Academy, though, and with a name like that I could only imagine how angry someone would be to find out that an idiot dropout got them kicked out of school for truancy. However, Haruhi would just have to deal with being late.

Slinging the backpack on my back and opening the map, I ran out of the apartment.

\---

School, I thought as I trudged through the fucking pink castle of a building, was just as irritating as I remember. Focusing on what the teacher said, taking word-for-word notes for Haruhi’s perusal when this was all figured out, was so much harder than it was already when deciphering what they said gave me a headache. I hoped Haruhi could read English, because I wasn’t fucking around with writing in Japanese. 

Which, hey, I was in Tokyo, Japan. Good to know.

What wasn’t good to know? It was apparently 2006, not 2018. What the fuck, right? So, if Haruhi was in my body, she was in the body of a six year old. From what I could gather, Haruhi was a first year in High School but apparently Japan only had three High School grades, so I was betting on her being sixteen. Or maybe she was in 2018, suddenly older than she remembered? 

God, thinking about it all was giving me a headache upon my headaches. 

Speaking of headaches, how was I going to do her homework? 

As is, classes had ended, but nobody was actually leaving. I had been trying to find somewhere that I could go over my notes, because Haruhi was in an Honors class. It would suck for her if she came back to failing grades, so I was going to force myself to keep them up no matter how much I wanted to just say fuck it to it all. Unfortunately, all the libraries I’d come across were full of chattering students, none of them actually studying. 

Multiple libraries, though? What a fucking rich people school, and no one was letting ‘Haruhi’ was a commoner who was only here because of a scholarship, and that she didn’t even have the money for a uniform. What fucking assholes. I’d had to hold myself back from starting fights so many times today, reasoning that Haruhi wouldn’t want a black eye. 

_ Still _ , I reasoned, walking up a luxurious staircase,  _ they have a knack for architecture. _

It seemed like every dozen feet or so there was a ceiling mural, or a chandelier, or some expensive sculpture. In comparison, I felt rather drab and dreary, despite thinking that the outfit would look cute on Haruhi. 

Cute outfits wouldn’t do me any good if I couldn’t study or figure out how the fuck to write in Japanese. Didn’t they have three written languages? How on earth was I going to be able to do this, I don’t know. 

As if on cue, I came upon a completely silent room.  _ Music Room 3 _ , the sign said, and for a moment I rolled my eyes at the idea of having so many rooms for a single subject. Still, if it was empty then it would be a boon. I reached forward to pull it open - only to get hit with a face full of rose petals.

“Welcome!” a chorus of voices said brightly as I coughed rose petals out of Haruhi’s mouth. 

There were six boys, arranged around a chair in which one sat. The one in the chair… did not look Japanese at all. Or maybe vaguely? He looked very European to me, though there were some students I’d seen like that, with bright blond hair and big blue eyes. There was a tall, dark-haired boy with glasses, along with an even taller black-haired boy who had a severe poker face. A pair of redheaded twins that I vaguely recognized from my class, and a very young-looking blond boy holding a stuffed pink bunny. 

As if on cue, the European began a spiel about bored rich boys entertaining bored rich girls, as well as something about a school Host Club.

Which. Okay. It had been a long time since I went through my anime phase, which had begun with Naruto in Middle School and ended with Haikyuu! in my Sophomore year in High School. Even after so long, though, I had a vague idea what a Host was.

My mouth dropped open in a bit of a gape. Wasn’t Hosting frowned on in mainstream culture? I had watched a documentary about this once, a few years ago.... Jeez, I could hardly remember.

“Oh, it’s a boy,” chorused the twins, looking suddenly incredibly bored.

“Hikaru, Kaoru,” started the one in glasses, addressing the twins. “This visitor is in the same class as you, right?”

“Yes, he is,” they continued in sync. “But he isn’t very sociable, so we don’t know him too well.”

How were they supposed to, I wondered. First day of school and all. Plus, I wasn’t exactly throwing myself into conversations when I still wasn’t even sure if people would understand me. I’d gotten away with not speaking thus far, would this strange ability to understand and read Japanese translate to my own speech? I knew it didn’t for my writing. 

The one in glasses laughed as the twins shrugged. “It’s impolite to say it like that.” He then turned to me, where I had been slowly inching towards the door and grasping for the door knob. “Welcome to Ouran Host Club, Honor Student.”

I gulped.

The European shot up from his seat. “What? Then, this exceptionally rare honor student we’ve heard about, Fujioka Haruhi, is you?”

Oh dear, they knew Haruhi’s name. It was as if I had become disconnected from Haruhi’s body - I felt cold and numb. This was more interaction than I had ever wanted, and suddenly the need to cry came back from this morning. Haruhi’s fingers clenched tight around the sheets of papers in them, though I felt as though I had done nothing.

“Ah,” I heard Haruhi’s mouth say, felt Haruhi’s head nod. Her fingers finally grasped the door knob tightly. 

The one in glasses crossed his arms with a smile that raised the hair on the back on Haruhi’s neck. “It’s just that our school tradition makes it difficult for commoners to get in. I’ve been told that unless you possess a rather audacious nerve, you cannot become an honor student here.”

Well, damn. Good for Haruhi.

Oh dear, European is getting near. Oh dear, his hand is on Haruhi’s shoulder. I still feel very distant.

“Yes!” said the blond. “He’s saying that you are a hero, Fujioka-kun! Even though you might be at the head of the class, you are still the poorest person in the whole school.”

I don’t think Haruhi would appreciate this if she were here. I know I don’t. Yet I can’t seem to contort her face muscles into anything aside from slight shock.

“Maybe you lowly people are looked down upon.” The blond continued, waving a hand theatrically in front of he and I. “It doesn’t matter, does it? Long live the poor! Welcome to our world of beauty, poor man!”

With that, he spun around and opened his arms as if to welcome me into a hug. Reality closed back in on me slowly and then all at once - I really was here, in someone else’s body, listening to some blond call that person whose body I occupied poor. 

I didn’t have to deal with this. I had only stayed so long after classes ended because I was afraid of what awaited me back at the apartment. A person whose pronouns and name I didn’t know who called me darling. No cell phone to try and call home with, no feasible reason for all this, and no way out of it. Situations like mine, they really made me want to scream.

But that would be better than listen to a rich boy lament about poor people.

I turned to leave, only for a small set of hands to grab onto me.

“Hey, Haru-chan! Haru-chan! Haru-chan!” said the small, young-looking blond, pulling back into the room. “You’re a hero? Amazing!”

I shook my head furiously, still not trusting my own vocal cords, gently prying his fingers off mine and taking a step back.

The European slid back into view, looking thoughtful. “Still, to think that such a fabled erudite student would be gay…”

My spine snapped straight and I clenched my fists. 

“Is there something wrong with that?” I ground out, my first words all day, voice softly spoken by like a cough, my throat sore from sudden use after such long rest. I glared darkly at the European.

Not even now, not like this, would I ever let someone belittle me for something like that. Never again, not even when I was in someone else’s body. And it was almost like a switch was flipped, because thoughtful on the European turned to amorous as he crowded into my space and lifted my hand to his lips.

“Of course not, my prince,” he murmured. “All are welcome here. What’s your preference? The wild type?” he gestured to the tallest of the bunch. “The boy-lolita?” he gestured to the boy who had called me Haru-chan. “The little-devil?” the twins, Hikaru and Kaoru. “The cool type?” The boy in glasses.

I shook my head, yanking my hand back, putting at least a foot of distance between he and I. Still, he came closer, this time reaching out to stroke a hand down my face, causing a shiver down my spine. 

“Or maybe,” he said slowly, lidded eyes gazing deeply into Haruhi’s. A small part of me screamed to say yes to whatever came out of his mouth. “You’d like to try me? How about it?”

This was perhaps the second craziest thing to happen to me today, I decided as I tripped over Haruhi’s feet to get away. Only, of course, to knock over a vase, because that was just my luck today. Staring down at the shattered blue remains of what was most likely a very costly piece, I felt shadows loom behind me.

“The Renaissance vase that was to be featured in the school auction!” said one of the twins, the one with the squeakier voice, in a very decidedly not-worried way. 

“Now you’ve done it,” continued the other. “We were going to start the bidding at 8 million yen.”

I closed Haruhi’s eyes. One American dollar is roughly one hundred Japanese yen. How many one hundreds went into eight million? Haruhi was too poor to pay this back - what had I done? I’d ruined her life!

“How can I pay you back?” I asked, not opening my eyes. 

“How, indeed,” said the twins together. “You can’t even afford the school uniform. What kind of outfit is that?”

It was like they knew where my weak points were.

“What will it be, Tamaki?” asked the boy in glasses from behind as I spun to look at him. He was holding a shard of the remains, examining it with an unreadable look.

The European - Tamaki? - sat back in his chair from the start, crossing his legs as though he were a very important person. “Have you ever heard this saying, Fujioka-kun?  _ When in Rome, do as the Romans do! _ If you have no money, pay with your body! Starting today, you are the Host Club’s dog!”

What had I gotten Haruhi into?

I needed to pay this debt off quick - using as little as Haruhi’s money as possible. With a forlorn sigh as the group gathered around me, I bowed my head slightly as I’d seen others do today, hoping I didn’t bungle it. 

“If that pays it off,” I whispered, still afraid that they wouldn’t understand. But Tamaki had, hadn’t he, when I had gotten angry? Indeed, they seemed to understand me perfectly. “Please take care of me.”

\---

 

It wasn’t too long after introductions had been made, finally, that I had been sent out to buy more snacks. Ootori (for that’s what I think I’m supposed to call him, his family name) had handed me a list that I didn’t understand, not really, and sent me off. I had gotten out the map that Haruhi had prepared before all of this, using it to find the nearest supermarket, which boasted a 24 hour opening as well as the cheapest liquor on the block. 

I wished for a shot of whiskey. And then I didn’t, suddenly ill at the memory of a recent hangover. As I tried to not puke, I wandered the store with a shopping basket and the list. Finding things was easy enough - I simply chose the cheapest of the lot. 

Now that I thought about it, how did they expect me to pay?

Oh.

They expect me to pay.

I fished around in the school bag for Haruhi’s wallet, looking at the meager amount of cash that was inside it. 

And for a moment, it was like some higher being had taken pity on me, as a sign caught my eye by the cash registers, hung on an office door.  _ Help Wanted _ , it read, and below that,  _ Open Interviews All Day _ , in hastily scribbled writing. 

By the time I left the supermarket, Fujioka Haruhi’s name was in the system as a part-time employee on the 11pm-5am shift, starting at 719 yen per hour. I had managed to convince my boss that I was simply terrible at writing, so terrible that most teachers claimed I could never turn in an essay, which was why I needed to dictate my answers to the application to him. I assumed that Haruhi had never had a job before, so no references, and the man had been so desperate for workers apparently that he had waived a lot of the finicky, government parts I didn’t understand. 

It would be hell for me to do this. But I was used to overnights, even if Haruhi’s body wasn’t, and I was even more used to running on few hours of sleep. I could sleep on the weekends, but the weekdays were now jam-packed. Taking into how much I was going to be studying, plus the new Club I had been forced to join, and now a job, whose income would only be going towards paying off the debt - I was going to have to perfect the art of 20 minute naps during lunch. 

I sent a brief apology to Haruhi, wherever she was.  _ I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.  _

 

\---

 

By the time I got back to Ouran, the Club was in full swing. Girls in buttercup yellow dresses sat around the Hosts, all of them playing a part. Even Ootori, scary and cold though he is, had a gaggle of girls around him. I didn’t really want to talk to him, but I didn’t know what else to do with the paper bag in my arms. 

“Oh, speak of the devil!” I heard Suoh say. “Thanks for shopping for us, little piglet! Did you get everything bought alright?”

I felt my eyelid twitch as he winked at me. “Yes, Suoh-san.”

He beckoned me forward, and once I was in range, grabbed a container of instant coffee from the bag. Suoh turned it over in his hands curiously. 

“What’s this?” he asked, and suddenly I realized that rich people probably don’t drink instant coffee.

“Coffee,” I said simply, feeling tired from the conversation already.

“I’ve never seen this name brand,” he said. “Is this the kind that’s already ground?”

“It’s instant coffee,” I said to him. I didn’t know the difference between a cup of Starbucks or something shitty, so instant was the only thing I’d ever drank, though I wasn’t much a fan of coffee. 

The girls that were sitting with Suoh looked quizzically at each other, murmuring the word ‘instant’ to themselves.

Suoh, however, looked ecstatic. “Oh, commoners’ coffee, where you only have to add hot water, right?”

One of the girls, with long light brown hair styled prettily, sat forward eagerly. “Oh, I’ve heard of this.”

The one next to her, with a princess haircut and a pretty smile, also began to look excited. “So it’s true about poor people not having any free time, so they can’t even grind their own beans, huh?”

To my astonishment, a crowd was slowly forming. Hikaru, Kaoru, more guests, and even Ootori, had gathered around the sitting area to stare. I chewed on my tongue anxiously.

“Commoners have their wisdom.” Suoh declared.

“It says that 100 grams costs 300 yen,” one of the twins said, the one on my right, before the other one continued. “That’s an incredible price drop.”

“Would you rather I go back and buy something else?” I asked through gritted teeth. 

“No, wait,” said Tamaki, standing up. “I’ll drink this. I’ll drink this, alright?”

His words were met with ooh’s, ahh’s, and clapping. I closed my eyes, knowing I was going to be the one making the fucking coffee, and asked myself if Haruhi really wanted to go to this school if these were the people in it. She’d only been here for what, maybe two days apparently, before I’d woken up in her body? Short enough that she had no idea what she was getting into, short enough that no one was noticing a difference between her and I.

Suoh interrupted my thoughts and deliberations. “Alright, Haruhi! Come over here and make this commoners’ coffee!”

He and his entourage had moved over to a long table by the window, setting up cups and such happily. I followed at a slower pace, almost pausing when I heard someone talking, but shook it off and continued. Whilst mostly it was annoying, there was a small part of me amused by their excitement over such a small, simple thing. Preparing the coffee took only a few minutes, so it wasn’t long before I had a tray of expensive cups holding inexpensive coffee. 

“Alright!” Suoh said, smiling brightly. “Let the tasting begin!”

The group of girls whose cups I had prepared looked down at them with apprehension. 

“I’m almost scared to drink this,” said one.

“If I drink this, my father will yell at me,” said another. 

Suoh smiled, sweeping the girl off her feet in a magnificent dip. “What if you drank it from my mouth?”

The girl looked shell shocked, saying softly, “I’d drink it.”

The others around squealed. Rolling my eyes, I decided to say fuck it - I needed the caffeine. I prepared another cup, draining it in one gulp - Suoh, who had seen this, as well as seen how hot the water was, blinked in shock. I stared him down as I put the cup back onto the table. It did burn, which I had expected, but it was grounding in a way. 

“Haruhi, you’re scary,” Suoh lamented as I gathered up the empty teacups. I patted him on the shoulder as I passed.

As the afternoon drug on, I wandered to and fro, cleaning up the messes of the Hosts and their guests, avoiding conversations left and right. Ootori hadn’t said anything when I handed him the receipt for the foods, so I had to assume that it had simply come out of Haruhi’s personal fund. Which, great. Add that on the list of things I’d done wrong to Haruhi.

Cleaning up after the Hosts did leave me to see how exactly they went about charming the young ladies. The twins, for example, portrayed a scene of almost-incest. It worked maybe too well than it should have, the two falling into the role incredibly easily. Suoh, however, charmed his guests using lines so cheesy I had to wonder how they worked. Ootori… I didn’t understand his methods. Essentially all he did was say fake sweet words and sign the guests up for even more appointments. Mori and Honey, as they’d asked to be called, simply played on the asymmetry of their friendship - cute and small Honey, tall and mysterious Mori. 

It was while watching them curiously that Ootori came up beside me.

“Honey-senpai is a prodigy, despite his appearance.” Ootori said. “And Mori-senpai’s draw is his silent disposition.”

I nodded quietly, in agreement. I’d met people shorter and older than Honey, so this wasn’t a stretch.

As if summoned like some kind of devil, Honey was suddenly in my face, smiling brightly and grabbing my arm. He proceeded to use it as a swing, unbalancing my already clumsy usage of Haruhi’s body. Going from nearly six foot to barely over five didn’t do good for balance.

“Haru-chan!” Honey drawled in a bright tone, finally ending my spins of suffering. “Haru-chan, want to have some cake with me?”

He really was like a kid, I thought dizzily. “Sorry, Honey-senpai, but I shouldn’t slack off any.”

Honey frowned, and then held out the stuffed pink bunny he had been carrying with him all day, far as I could tell. “Well, I’ll let you borrow my Usa-chan, then!”

I stared at Usa-chan with double vision, feeling almost as if it was staring back into my soul. Really, I was a sucker for kids, and anyone who seemed like a kid. Cute things… Suddenly, I missed my own apartment with a freezing ache, and my own stuffed animals. One specifically, Elly the Elephant, who I had bought all by myself at a garage sale when I was six, and he had been my constant companion since, always drug out whenever I felt sad, whose fur never grew course with age.

“Alright,” I said eventually, smiling gently as my vision returned. Honey blinked slowly, and then smiled, handed me the bunny and took off with giggles.

I held Usa-chan to Haruhi’s chest tightly, missing Elly. Haruhi’s fingers dug into the toy. Today still didn’t feel real enough, but this was still enough to make me want to cry.

Ootori, the bastard he was, had no apparent sympathy to my internal monologues. “Our club’s policy is to utilize everyone’s individual characteristics to respond to the needs of our guests. By the way,” he looked over his shoulder at me and then to Suoh. “Around here, Tamaki is our number one, the King. His request rate is 70 percent.”

I nodded, understanding. Cheesy though he was, Suoh’s ‘princely’ personality was something out of a romance novel you find with a half naked man on the cover, small in size but thick with pages. There was a reason they were so popular, those novels - mostly due to people like my mother, I knew. Unsatisfied people seeking romance in ink and paper when their own lives were left unfulfilled. 

Ootori turned to look at me with the same pleasant smile he gave guests. “By the way, with your 8 million-yen debt, you are this club’s dog until you graduate - pardon me, the club’s  _ errand boy _ . You’re free to run away, but my family employs an able, private police force of roughly 100. Do you have a passport?”

It was as if my soul had left Haruhi’s body, only I wasn’t that lucky. The urgency to pay the debt back before Haruhi and I switched back bodies was overwhelming. The fear that had simmered in the back of my mind around Ootori tripled in size.

“You be sure to work hard, Dasa-oka-kun,” said Suoh from behind me suddenly, blowing on my ear and causing me to flinch. “You’re not going to get any girls as disheveled as you look.”

I thought of my girlfriend back home. I had tried to not think of her all day long, nearly succeeding! I clenched Usa-chan even tighter, shoulders hunching around my ears.

“Good,” I said in a simple, sharp tone. 

“What are you talking about? This is important!” said Suoh, plucking a rose from a nearby vase and holding it out as if to offer it to a princess. “Becoming a fine man and pleasing the ladies is everything.”

I simply stared at him, glaring, and huffed. I wished he had never come up to Ootori and I in the first place. “That’s a very heterosexual view point.”

He didn’t even seem to hear, spinning around dramatically. “It’s a very cruel thing, isn’t it? Once in a while, God creates the perfect person, both inside and out. I understand how you must feel, wanting to console yourself like that. Otherwise, you couldn’t go on living.”

I watched silently as he began a tirade about beauty, gentlemanly actions, and how to set a teacup down silently. Listening to his voice whilst not truly paying attention to his words was like guided meditation, as Suoh’s voice was actually quite nice. Still, I couldn’t help but notice…

“You’re quite vain,” I mumbled, only to jolt and realize that Suoh had gone from ten feet away to right next to my face - and my words impacted him like deadweight, dragging him down. “Ah...oops.”

Hikaru and Kaoru propped their arms up on Haruhi’s head, laughing from wherever they had been hiding. “You’re a hero, all right!”

Still, looking at Suoh crouched by a pedestal, practically radiating angst… I’d hurt the kid’s feelings, and in that moment I realized that I was the oldest person in the room. Only 19 and already so tired. It was my responsibility, then, to make sure the kids were safe - even from my own words.

Jeez.

“Suoh-senpai,” I started, walking forward to pat his shoulder hesitantly. “What you said about using your pinkie - it was a very good tip. Thank you.”

For a moment, Suoh didn’t move. Then, he rose up from the ground like a sunflower at dawn, smiling brightly. Had he even been sad at all, I thought? 

“I see, I see!” he said, framing his chin in a very self-congratulatory way. “Then allow me to share another skill with you!”

Great, I sighed, as one of the twins did as well. 

“Sir,” said the twin on my right. 

“Call me King!” Suoh demanded.

“King,” the twin corrected. “You can teach the basics of hosting as much as you want.”

“But in his case,” started the other, “he hasn’t even passed the first, most basic visual test.”

Again with this shit? Haruhi was a sixteen year old girl, she shouldn’t have to deal with bullying about her looks!

“Now,” the twin continued, moving to stand in front of me and reaching his hands towards Haruhi’s face. “With someone of his type, even if you take off his glasses, his eyes just look that much smaller.”

As the twin slid Haruhi’s glasses off, his face went slack with surprise. Scowling, I reached for them, only for him to hold them out of reach, still staring. Haruhi really was blind without them.

I opened my mouth to scold them, only for the twins to be shoved apart in favor of Suoh getting into my face with a very intense look on his. 

“Hikaru, Kaoru!” 

“Yes, sir!”

And just like that, Usa-chan had been ripped from my arms as the twins dragged me off into a backroom. There was no time to argue, but my spine went stiff as a board. I didn’t like where this was going.

Still, as the twins shoved me into a curtained area, they didn’t seem malicious in intent. Indeed, all they did was rummage around in an ornate wardrobe and pull out one of the school’s male uniforms, periwinkle blue blazer and all. 

“Here!” they presented, shoving the uniform at me. “Change into this!”

“Why?” I asked.

“Don’t ask questions, just do it!” they jumped at me, and I ducked with a quick gasp. What the fuck.

“Fine!” I snapped, grabbing at the uniform and shoving them out of the curtains. “Just get out!”

I might not have a problem changing in front of others, but Haruhi might. I didn’t want her to come back, only to find out that these two shitheads had seen her body naked without her permission. 

As it was, I had trouble getting dressed on my own without really looking at her body. 

I could hear the Hosts coming into the room, and glanced at a clock. It was nearly five in the evening, and Ootori had said that Club hours ended at 4:30. Meaning I had to go to Haruhi’s apartment soon.

“Haruhi!” called Suoh from outside the curtain. “Here’s some contacts! And a hairbrush! Keep everything!”

Without any other preamble, the objects he spoke of - a giant box of contacts and a fine-toothed comb - crashed into the curtained-off area from over the top. I took a deep breath as they slammed into the ground with a clatter.

God, I hated putting contacts in. 

What vexed me most, perhaps, was the hair, though. How was I supposed to style it? As is, I had left the tie loose around my neck, unsure I would be able to undo a tight one, and the top button of the white button up of the uniform unbuttoned. Therefore, should I go with a messy hairstyle or a perfected one? My hair had never been this short, I lamented, tugging at it. 

So I flipped Haruhi’s head upside down, combing it from the bottom to give it volume, though it was short enough that doing so did little. I combed it through once before tussling it the same way I did my own, a messy side part, hair pulled out of Haruhi’s face. 

There, done.

“This is as good as it gets,” I stated, pulling the curtain back.

Suoh seemed awestruck. “How adorable! You almost look like a girl, don’t you? A mermaid, with your hair!”

Wait.

“Haru-chan, you look so cute!” squealed Honey.

Did he not know?

“If that’s how you really look, you should have said so sooner.” A twin said.

“A little messy,” said Ootori, “but you might even be able to draw some customers like that.”

“Yes!” exclaimed Suoh. “It’s all as I planned! The errand boy has graduated! Starting today, you are an official member of the Host Club! I will train you to be a first-rate Host! If you can get 100 customers to request you, we will forgive your 8 million-yen debt.”

Without thinking, I spouted, “Well that doesn’t seem financially smart.”

Ootori smirked. I probably wasn’t actually out of the blue… 

“But alright,” I said, shrugging. 8 million divided by 100 was 80,000 taken off for every customer. If I saved up the wages at my new job and added it to every request, I was sure that I could get out of this before the end of the year. “I’m going home, though. See you tomorrow, Suoh-senpai.”

“Call me Tamaki-senpai!” said boy said with fiery passion. “If I am to be your master, there is no need for form-”

“Bye, Tamaki-senpai,” I interrupted, practically bolting for the door and grabbing Haruhi’s book bag on the way.

Now, to find my way home.

\---

 

Haruhi’s...roommate was waiting in the kitchen when I finally got to the apartment at 5:23. Their long hair was pulled back in a ponytail and there was stubble on their face. Instead of wearing a dress, they wore jeans and a baggy tee. They looked up expectantly as I entered the room.

“Haruhi!” they smiled brightly. “Sit with daddy and tell him about your day!”

Well, that answered that at least.

I watched him enter the living room, sitting at a table where a tea set had been set up. Gulping, I went to sit down next to him. 

“Um,” I started softly, glancing at him. He smiled encouragingly. “I, uh… Got a job.”

Confusion lit Haruhi’s dad’s face. “Honey, isn’t that against the school policy?”

I blinked, a feeling of  _ oh shit oh shitohshitohshit _ flooding through me. “Uh. Well. I’m still going to keep it.”

Now he looked even more confused, and I was panicking. “Haruhi, what kind of job would make you jeopardize your education? You worked so hard to get into Ouran, not even letting me help with the paperwork…”

I sensed a bit of a story there, but didn’t have time. “I need the job, though! I… I kind of got myself into a bit of a bind.” At his intent look, I continued. “I accidentally broke a vase and now have an 8 million-yen debt to the school’s Host Club. They said I could pay it off by the end of the year, working for them, but honestlyIdon’tlikethesoundofthatsoI’mgoingtoworktopayitoffaswell.”

Despite how I had sped through the end, Haruhi’s dad seemed to understand me well enough. He closed his eyes and sighed, rubbing a hand over his face. I tried not to feel guilty, I wasn’t really his kid, but Haruhi would have to deal with the consequences of my actions. That alone had me wanting to angst my way to oblivion.

“And here I thought you didn’t take after me at all,” he mumbled with a soft laugh. “Haruhi, you should have just asked me for help - I would’ve put some money down, signed up for more hours… You don’t need to sacrifice three hours after school for this when I’m the parent.”

“Oh, no!” I interrupted whatever he was about to say after, desperate to keep talking despite how I knew I was digging myself a hole. “It’s my problem, I broke the vase, I should fix it. Besides, I wasn’t at work until now! I was working with the Club. My job, it starts at eleven. I get off at five, it’s at the supermarket near the school. It pays 719 an hour.”

Haruhi’s dad groaned. “Overnight? Oh darling, you really  _ do _ take after me, like a late bloom… If only your mother were here, she’d laugh her ass off.” He gazed over his shoulder at - a shrine? Huh, hadn’t noticed that. 

There were candles and offerings, all around a picture of a woman who looked a lot like Haruhi, if older and longer haired, smiling serenely. So Haruhi’s mom was dead, great. Who didn’t need a sad life story, chumps? I got saddled with assholes who kicked me out before I was even an adult and Haruhi was the over-achieving poor girl probably attempting to live up to her dead mother’s image. 

“Well!” said Haruhi’s dad, clapping his hands together and smiling. “If you’re going to work in a few hours, better get some food in you now. Let daddy help with your homework, Haruhi! You can’t grow up too fast!”

A familial warmth seemed to radiate from all around as Haruhi’s dad helped me cook a meal. I smiled at him when he wasn’t looking, feeling both jealous and relieved. At least Haruhi had her dad. 

 

\---

 

At five in the morning, I trudged back to the apartment, school bag in one hand - I had been studying on my breaks - small sack of lollipops I’d pilfered from the customer service desk in the other. I felt dead on my feet, more so than usual. Perhaps Haruhi’s body really did dictate how I would feel. I wondered if she had a serotonin deficiency as well as I, and if that sort of thing carried over to body switching. 

Haruhi’s dad, though his name might be Ranka, was awake still when I got back, dressed all out in his work attire, reading in the living room. 

“You go to bed, darling,” he waved me away when I went to greet him. “I’ll wake you up for school.”

And indeed he did, and there was a… well-meant breakfast waiting for me that I scarfed down despite how Haruhi’s taste buds screamed in horror. Ranka had apparently decided that if his daughter had to stay up so late and get little sleep, so would he, and he’d help his daughter while she did it. A kind, generous sentiment. 

And thus I dressed as I had yesterday for the club, stuck a handful of lollipops in my pocket, and got to school on time. I definitely garnered some stares with the sudden change in looks from Haruhi’s “messy academic” look. They should be happy I even tucked in the goddamn shirt so early in the morning. 

Classes were… both unbearably easy and terrifyingly hard. I took notes in English and turned in assignments with Ranka’s handwriting on them, hoping that no one would accuse me of cheating. The entire day I was hounded by girls asking about what I was doing at the Host Club, what had indebted me to them, and what was with the sudden change in appearance. Throughout it all, Hikaru and Kaoru didn’t acknowledge me, despite sitting on either side of me. Perhaps I wasn’t as interesting to them outside of Club.

Some of the girls told me about different clubs. Only one caught my attention.

The Black Magic Club.

There was no logical explanation for what had happened to me and Haruhi. Nothing reasonable. And every time I attempted to call anyone I knew, even the home phone number I had all but forgotten from my childhood before cell phones, all I got was the dial tone.

Perhaps what I needed was a bit of magic, so I resolved to find them before the clubs started. Though it was a bit much to ask of a bunch of High Schoolers, but after a night of terrible sleep, all I wanted was an answer. 

(The thought wiggled in the back of my head.  _ Are you really going to abandon Haruhi to a debt you incurred? _ )

When classes ended for the day, I hurried through the building, in the direction of the basement, where I heard the club held their activities. 

I found them in a large room with no windows, lit only by candles and filled with lounge sofas and hard back chairs. Bookshelves lined the walls, filled with old-looking tomes, and fake-looking skulls decorated every table.

Maybe I was asking too much.

“What’s this?” a voice warbled. “A prospective member!”

A shadow crawled out of the darkness, a cat puppet attached to a hand. I had been warned already of this person, Nekozawa Umehito.

“A glorious day, this is, for the underworld,” continued Nekozawa, “when a person finally accepts the darkness-”

“Wrong,” I interrupted bluntly, watching with slight amusement as his shoulders drooped. “I thought there were more members to your club, Nekozawa-senpai.”

Nekozawa straightened his back, the dark strands of hair and the black hood covering most of his face. “I’ve heard of you, Fujioka Haruhi-san. Have you, too, come to laugh at what the esteemed Black Magic club has become?”

I felt bad, then, for interrupting. “Ah, no, sorry. I… I actually need your help, Nekozawa.”

Explaining the situation - waking up in someone else’s body, the time difference - didn’t actually take long. It was the rest of the mess that took longer, the debt and rule breaking. 

“This is truly vexing,” said Nekozawa, rubbing his chin. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep your secret, Haruhi-san- ah, actually, what is your name?”

I opened my mouth to tell him before snapping it shut after a thought. “Let’s just stick with Haruhi, so you don’t call me by my actual name in public. Will you help me, Nekozawa? You’re pretty much my only hope.”

It was a long, tense silence that followed.

Nekozawa nodded. “Yes.” Oh thank god. “I’ll do some research on body swapping and time spells, and get back to you as soon as possible. If you’d like, I can tutor you in Japanese and the subjects taught here as well.”

I blinked, reaching up to rub the back of Haruhi’s head. “Ah, you don’t have to do that, Nekozawa. I’m already piled up as it is in debts…”

He was quick to wave it off. “Oh, no! No! Not as a favor, just… Perhaps… As a friend.”

I paused, staring at him, unable to see his true expression. “Oh. Alright. Friends, then.”

I smiled brightly at him, feeling warmed by his offer. Friends were something I’d always found hard to make and keep, so to find my first friend in this situation was a nice thought. It almost made me feel like I wasn’t as trapped alone as I was.

Nekozawa looked away and shrugged. “Just come down after you’re done with the Host Club.”  
I nodded, standing from the couch and looking for a clock. 

Oh fuck.

“I’m late!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> probably the longest of all the chapters/fics here but whatever. 
> 
> Comment if you'd like, take ideas if you want just drop a link to the fic you use it for.


	10. Delia Dealing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> HP, SIOC. Recreational drug use.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i suggest skipping this chapter if you don't like weed lmao.

The year is 1991 and there is a child in his house.

This would be odd enough, alarming even, aside from the fact that Steve is in the business of selling illegal substances. Not much! Just things like marijuana, LSD, mushrooms.... Nothing too hard. And generally, Steve will sell to anyone, including that one memorable seventeen year old who paid in golden coins. But a kid? He’s never sold to anyone who wasn’t of age to at least get their A-levels. 

But here she is. She’s short, scrawny, with tanned skin and brown curls that are tugged back into a braid. She wears glasses - large, circular ones that take up half her face and magnify her brown eyes - and is wearing a school uniform, though he doesn’t recognize it from the area. But then, school is supposed to be out until next month, right? Or was it last month? He hasn’t had to worry about that in a very long time. She’s even carrying a book bag! When she smiles hesitently, he notices a gap between her large, front teeth.

“C’mon Steve,” Mick is saying, standing next to the girl. Loyal customer, Mick. Bit of a dumbass, though. “She’s super smart, knows how to keep a secret - she just wants to get high!”

Steve groans, rubs a hand over his face and pushes his bangs out of his eyes. Sure enough, the kid’s hand keeps drifting to a bulging pocket where he knows she must have money. Probably taken right out of her own piggy bank, too. 

“You know what - look - kid,” he rambles, crouching to get on the kid’s level - she’s barely taller than his hip! “What’s your name?”

She smiles, polite and just like a lawyer or some shit, and says, “Delia. Just Delia.”

Smart kid. Or, he rethinks, not so smart to be getting into drugs.

“Delia,” he smiles, hopefully nicely. His teeth aren’t the best, but she doesn’t seem to take notice. “I’m Steve. Do you know what you’re doing right now?”

Delia doesn’t look uncertain. “Well, I thought I was trying to buy drugs.”

He barks a laugh out without thinking. Mick’s giggling, too, the pissant. Fine.

“How much are you looking to buy?” he asks, deciding not to baby her. If she can’t keep up, she shouldn’t be here.

“A pound,” she says confidently. 

Steve’s jaw drops. Delia doesn’t change her mind in the time it takes him to look at a sheepish Mick and back to her childish face. In fact, her smile takes on an amused smirk-like look. 

“A pound,” he repeats. Delia nods, and Steve swallows. “What does a ten year old need a pound for?”

This gets something. Delia’s brow pinches just the slightest, and if Steve didn’t have younger siblings himself he wouldn’t have been able to tell. Her lips thin, and her eyes narrow.

“I’m 12 in a month, thank you,” she sniffs. 

“12,” he corrects indulgently with an amused air. Kids, he thinks, always eager to be older than they are. When did he stop doing that, he wonders? When did he start thinking of himself as an adult - and of them as kids? “My point stands. What does a 12 year old want with a pound of weed?”

Delia is actually starting to look annoyed. “I understand it can be disconcerting to deal to a little girl, but this isn’t my first rodeo.” What American movies is she watching to have that saying come so easy? “I’d like a pound, how much can you sell for one?”

Steve looks at Mick again. The ruddy bastard has the audacity to look proud! Why, if Steve finds out this is Mick’s little cousin paid to make a fool of him for Mick’s amusement, Steve’ll kick his ass.

“Around twenty-three hundred and twenty pounds ,” he says after a moment of thought.

Delia nods after a moment of thinking, and he can see her lips twitching like she’s trying to not think aloud. “Alright, sounds reasonable.”

She fishes out the large wad of banknotes in her pocket. They’re all 50£ notes and in various states of distress. Without prompting, Delia turns to his kitchen table and starts to count them out aloud, placing the notes in piles of 500£. All in all, she counts out 2350£, and still has enough to shove a small handful back into her pocket. Throughout it all, Steve is suddenly glad that Mick is the one to have brought her here. Dumbass though he is, Mick would never rob a little girl. Some of his other customers couldn’t say the same. 

She then turns to him, a stack of money behind her on the table that no 12-year-old should have, and raises an eyebrow. There’s a cheeky glint to her eyes, and for a moment she smiles, dimple-cheeked and tongue caught between her teeth, before she schools her face. If she were older, Steve might be inclined to get to know her better - as is, all he sees when she looks at him is his younger siblings.

God, he must be going to hell for this.

“Any specific strain you’re looking for?” he asks finally.

“Sativa,” she says without skipping a beat. Damn, he had hoped to make her nervous with a question most people buying from him couldn’t answer. Most people just thought grass and didn’t try to differentiate between the strains.

He nods and stands from his crouch. (His knees twinge and he hides a wince. When had Steve started to get so old?) He doesn’t keep his wares in the kitchen, which would be dumb. He buys by the pound, so there’s no need for him to even open a bag. Hefting one into his arms, Steve carries it back to the kitchen where Mick and Delia are talking quietly.

Steve pauses outside the door, to listen.

“-buying this much,” Mick is saying. “Where did the days go of a little girl buying a gram of shitty hash from me during her lunch break go?”

“In the trash along with my first tampon,” Delia says brazenly. Mick isn’t fazed, to Steve’s surprise. What kind of kid, especially a tween girl, talks like that? “Desperate times, desperate measures.”

Mick nods, reaching a hand to muss up her hair. “Boarding school.”

Delia opens her mouth to reply with a crooked grin before the expression drops as Steve walks back into the room. Steve himself is deep in thought. Boarding school, huh? That could explain it. Mick, he knew, often times sold to his friends to make a quick buck. He had also graduated with his A-levels last year, so he could, maybe, be in the same area as Delia whilst she was in school. A few connections between friends and siblings and Steve could see Mick selling to a kid without thinking about that kid telling on him.

Steve sets the clear bag down onto the kitchen table, next to the money. It looks like something out of a crime movie, he thinks.

For a moment, Delia simply stares at the large bag. The corners of her lips twitch, like she wants to smile brightly. Then, she reaches forward, and after a look at Steve, undoes the twist-tie keeping the bag closed. She reaches in and pulls out a bud that easily weighs ten grams. Delia turns it over and over in her hands, feeling and looking closely at it, inspecting the colors and crystals. Then she takes a whiff of it - it’s a powerful smell, but definitely not the dankest Steve has ever had. Even so, the act has Steve torn between nervous and incredulous.

A little girl inspecting weed like a particularly paranoid buyer.

When the exchange is made, all she gives is another polite smile, thanking him for his work. Then she opens her backpack, and a the overpowering odor of coffee hit him full force. Inside, the bottom of her pack has a thick layer of coffee beans, a science book taped to the back to give the bag some structure. It’s lined with… Dryer sheets? Innovative, he thinks. 

She hefts the bag into her backpack, securing it tightly. When it’s shut, all he can smell is the faint smell of lavender and coffee.

“Thank you for your time, sir,” she says to him, politely declining her head.

_ Ah _ , Steve thinks.  _ I’m really going to Hell. _

“It’s just Steve, kid,” he says, and grabs a napkin out of his dispenser on the table and a nearby pen. “If you ever need anything, weed related or not, call me.”

She takes the written-on napkin gently, surprise written in the way her eyes widen, gratitude in the way she holds the napkin close to her. She doesn’t say anything, just nods and gives him a smile. A genuine one, like the one she gave Mick before he’d interrupted, tongue-in-teeth.

\---

“Granger, Cordelia!” calls the stern-faced woman who had introduced herself as Professor McGonagall.

Hermione watches as her twin sister walks up to the stool where the Sorting Hat sits, wringing her hands. She had been worried about this, about if they were to go to different Houses, and if they would stay as close as they were if they didn’t end up together. Hermione was certain of where she wanted to go, personally; Gryffindor seemed to be the best House, hands-down, especially if their Headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, had come from it. But when she had questioned Cordelia on the subject, her sister had gotten quite pensive.

“I’ve noticed a bit of a trend in bias,” she had said, motioning towards her own stack of books. Cordelia was perhaps the only person to read more than Hermione herself. “But I rather think it’ll be a toss up. I don’t mind where I go.”

That was Cordelia, though. Hermione had never understood her sister’s attitude, how she never seemed to have any actual ambitions aside from reading or hanging out with older kids in their town. It was something Hermione fought hard to not be jealous over. Just because Hermione couldn’t make a friend outside her sister didn’t mean she had to be mad that her sister could. Hermione just didn’t understand it! They did all the same things, read at the same pace, were top students in their grades; what about Cordelia did people like that they didn’t about Hermione?

Oh, wait, the Sorting!

Lost in her thoughts, Hermione had missed Cordelia sitting down and having the Hat placed on her head. However, it seemed to be taking Cordelia quite a while, and the minutes dragged on and on. Hermione didn’t look around, but she could see in the corners of her eyes that the other students were getting antsy.

Finally, after a very long amount of time, the Hat opened it’s sewn mouth. 

“ **_HUFFLEPUFF!_ ** ” it shouted, and the table of yellow and black rose up in cheers.

Hermione watched her sister, now clad in yellow and black, as the girl strode to her new table. Cordelia met her eyes as she settled in next to Finch-Fletchly, Justin, and gave her an encouraging smile.

“Granger, Hermione!” called Professor McGonagall.

Hermione took a deep breath.

\---

\- best friends with Megan Jones (younger sister to Gwenog Jones, older sister to Peter Jones, dark skinned and broad shouldered, her hair pulled back into cornrows) and Wayne Hopkins (a rather sleazy looking boy with short, greasy black hair always combed back with perpetually-narrowed eyes and a crooked nose).

\- acquaintances with Cedric Diggory, later they date during her fourth (his seventh) year during the Triwizard Tournament. (Cho ends up dating Harry for a few months before they break up awkwardly. When Cedric is killed, Cordelia does not take it well. Hermione fears her sister is going Dark.)

\- more interested in smoking weed than doing homework, but knows where her priorities should be. 

\- sixth year has a fling with Daphne Greengrass.

\- Joins Dumbledore’s Army ASAP

\- actually becomes quite good friends with Steve, though she has to take care to not reveal magic. Steve is quite worried for the little sister he’s adopted who always comes back from her school year with tales of murder and intrigue. (When she has to go into hiding when Snape takes over Hogwarts, she leaves him a letter that worries him greatly. There are terrorist attacks happening everywhere and she seems to be involved in some sort of underground war.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> decided to leave the notes in at the end, which i haven't been doing. 
> 
> Comment if you'd like. Use the ideas I present in your own fics if you want, just drop a link to your fic in the comments.


	11. Vita Zabini: Book Burgler

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vita Zabini has one goal for this life: know everything and give people free information. (SIOC, Blaise Zabini's twin.)

The first Big Event in her existence was when she was born. Again, that is. 

Vita was never quite able to remember who she was, when she had lived, or how old she had been when she’d died. The one thing she knew with certainty was that she had been a Muggle and now she was not. 

She was born on a cold winter night, five days until Christmas, in 1979 as the younger of two fraternal twins. Throughout the pregnancy, Fausta Zabini had been told that one of the twins, the girl, seemed to be quite frail and weak. She wasn’t expected to survive the birth, not like her brother who by all accounts was strong and healthy for a fetus. Imagine the surprise of both Fausta and every Healer in the room when the baby, only halfway out of her mother’s womb, began to wail like a banshee. Fausta thought it was a blessing and named her after the life she was graced with.

Of course, by 1979, Fausta Zabini had already cultivated her renowned image as the Black Widow Witch. All her lovers or husbands died in mysterious circumstances, always after having signed away their worldly possessions and wealth to Fausta, and thus a previously unknown first generation pureblood witch was thrust into high society of Europe’s Wizarding World. As ambitious and intelligent as she was beautiful, Fausta did not waste away her fortunes; she took stocks out of many high profile businesses, both Muggle and Magical, as well as owning many small businesses around the world. 

One of the most prolific things she had done to turn Pureblood society on its head was the lack of House Elves she employed - and the massive numbers of so-called undesirables that she employed instead. From muggleborns to squibs, werewolves to vampires, Fausta had a strict non-discrimination policy for everything she did. 

 

\---

 

Vita sat in the dirt under the shade of an orange tree, reading from a book on the basics of magical theory. Every now and then, one of the orchard workers would pass by with equipment or baskets of fruits in their arms, greeting her in various ways as they went. She barely looked up from her book to return the greetings most of the time, so absorbed in her book was she. But that was how she was most of the time, and the staff of Villa Carideo di Isola di Capri were used to her bookworm ways. 

She couldn’t help it, wanting to be absorbed into the book until she knew it by heart and understood it in its complexities. Magic was such a wondrous, beautiful thing, and with the memories of a Muggle life in her head she saw it quite differently from a regular magically-raised child. In fact, her views on its splendor was more akin to a Muggleborn if anything. So as soon as she had gotten her hands on books - first in English, then Italian when she learned to read her native tongue, and then some - she had dived into learning. 

At the age of five she had nearly read through the entire Zabini library, devouring book after book, day after day.

“My beautiful Vita,” a smokey voice drawled, and Vita snapped her head up. “Hiding amongst the orange blossoms again?”

Fausta Zabini, her mother in this life, stood just outside the shade of the orange tree Vita’s back was against. Her white sundress, with it’s wide skirt that moved with even the slightest breeze, was in stark contrast to her skin, which was akin to dark chocolate. Her hair was in box braids today, thick and full down her back, and pulled away from her violet eyes. Vita thought her mother was the most beautiful woman in the world, and was thankful for inheriting most of her looks. Where Fausta’s eyes were almost dark purple, Vita and her brother’s were a green so dark they looked black until light shone on them, and their skin was only a few shades lighter than Fausta. Whoever their father had been, he had not been black, for neither twin had inherited their mother’s natural hair, though theirs was thick with curls.

“Mama!” Vita grinned, dropping her book carelessly on the ground as she threw herself at her mother, pressing her face into her skirts and feeling her knees press against her forehead. “You’re back! How was France?”

Fausta leant down, a kind smile on her face that made her even more radiant, and picked her daughter up to hold her on her hip, grabbing the book as well. “France was just as lovely as I’d seen it last. Pierre, unfortunately, is no longer among the living.”

Vita thought back to the man Fausta had been seeing the past few months. Pierre Malfoy, a distant cousin of Lord Malfoy, had been a rich man who had fallen for her mother easily, and Fausta had seemed amused and fond of the man in equal amounts. Enough, at least, to become engaged to the man. 

“How did he die?” she asked, simply because that was what she always asked. 

Fausta sighed deeply, and started walking back towards the main villa through the fields, barefoot in the dirt paths through the orchards. “It was the saddest thing, the poor man had a heart attack. Quite uncommon for a wizard, but Pierre had always had low health. I hope he is happy, wherever he is.”

Vita hummed in sympathy, and tried to listen past the sadness in her mother’s voice. She, like everyone who knew of the Black Widow Witch of Italy, knew her mother had a hand in the man’s death though there was never enough proof to even take her into custody. Her mother knew she knew, and seemed to find her attempts to ferret it out directly akin to a puppy attempting to dig for the first time; with fond pride and amusement.

“Pierre knew his time was coming, I think,” Fausta continued. “He revised his will almost constantly. Sweet man he was, he left our family quite a lot.”

Vita’s eyes snapped up expectantly. “What did he leave us?”

Vita was still unused to the opulence and riches of her family, after spending a lifetime scraping by paycheck by paycheck in a cockroach-infested apartment. It brought her a thrill every time she thought about the mounds of gold in her family’s possession, and pride that her mother didn’t use it only for herself but to better the lives of those in need. 

“Oh, nothing special,” Fausta said in a lofty tone. “His Paris mansion, a vacation home in New Zealand, his personal assets...and his personal library.”

Vita squealed. “Really, mama?! Pierre had  _ the _ most interesting collection of books of any of your partners! Are they already in the Villa Library?”

Fausta let out a deep chuckle. “Not yet, my darling. I’ve got a team of Curse Breakers going over it all first, never know what hexes are on those books.”

Vita groaned, falling limp backwards to dangle in her mother’s grasp as though the very life in her blood had failed her. “I still don’t understand why anyone would hex a book, mama. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of having a library?”

Fausta shook her head, pulling her daughter upright as they reached the gardens behind the main villa. “It simply keeps people not of the family from reading them, most times. All the books in our library are warded so as not to show any information to those not a Zabini or sworn staff.”

This was news to Vita, who had never had a problem with reading the books. But then again, she was a Zabini, so the hexes wouldn’t affect her. She had seen many of staff in the library, reading and learning during their down-time. Was that not normal?

“Mama,” she began. “What are other libraries like?”

“Well, for starters, I don’t know much about other families’ libraries,” said Fausta. “They’re well-guarded, and generally hold the secrets to understanding your family magic. I only know about the ones I’ve inherited, and they’ve always been hexed in some way.”

Vita frowned. “Okay, but what about public libraries?”

Fausta rolled her eyes with a small smile for a moment, before realizing her daughter was looking at her seriously. “Vita, my love, the wizarding world does not  _ do _ public libraries, not like the muggles. Magic is power, so knowledge of it is guarded zealously. Imagine if anyone was able to walk off the street into it - they could steal the books for themselves!”

Vita was floored, but nodded and hummed in agreement so as to not show her unease. It sounded like, to her, a way to control one’s position in the world, to enforce a class system amongst pureblood versus muggleborns. If those without a family library hadn’t a way to learn before starting school, they were probably vastly out-performed by their counterparts  _ with  _ family libraries. 

Some of the staff, when she’d cornered them and forced her presence on them to understand who they were, spoke of the Zabini Villa Library with reverence, and nearly all of them were desperate for the knowledge within it. It was the same knowledge withheld from them before, just because they were muggleborns, or squibs, or non-humans. 

It was distasteful, decided Vita.

An idea came to her.

“Mama,” she said, catching Fausta’s attention from a rose bush shaped like a pixie. “I’m going to open the first public, magical library. Everyone deserves to learn.”

Fausta patted her daughter on the back with the book in her other hand. “I’m sure you will, darling.”

From her tone, Vita knew Fausta didn’t believe her. After all, she was just five. But Vita was determined, the idea solidifying in her mind. How would she fill the library? Fausta certainly wouldn’t let her take the books from the Zabini Villa Library, though there were multiple duplicates in the shelves. 

_ I’ll copy them all down by hand if I have to _ , she thinks. 

But what about other books? The Zabini Villa Library was comprehensive of many subjects, but even it had blank spots of topics and books. She could buy books, certainly, but bookstores in the wizarding world were all very generic and the same. It was rare when a new book would be published and sold world-wide; in fact, new books were usually limited in print, and sold for high prices. Many of the tomes in her family’s library could be found nowhere else. Surely that meant there were other hidden treasures in the libraries of other families?

_ I can’t just flounce in and take their books, either, _ she thought with a frown as Fausta contented herself in the silence to carry her daughter around the gardens.  _ But then again… _

Her Muggle existence may have been magic-less, but it had certainly not been boring. 

_ I just won’t ask for them _ . Vita decided with a small smirk on her lips, staring up at the clouds.  _ I’ve always hated asking for permission. _

 

\---

 

Vita was bouncing with excitement as she paced between columns on the front porch of the main villa, dressed smartly in soft blue robes with her mass of curls done in an elegant up-do with a crown braid wrapping around her hairline. The high, tight collar of the outer-cloak itched against the nape of her neck, but it was a sacrifice she was willing to make for today. 

Today was, after all, the most important day of her life so far. Today was the day she and her brother were getting their first wands, and they’d be going to Diagon Alley for the first time to do it! The age of six was a traditional pureblood age to get a first wand, though it had fallen out of style in the past century like most pureblood traditions. Only old families, like the Black’s or Malfoy’s, did it these days. 

Blaise, who was sitting on the steps leading to the porch in his matching blue robes, patiently waiting for their mother, had been the one to spark this. Her twin had noticed Vita getting more anxious than usual lately about not being able to explore the practical side of her studying, despite how their nanny taught them everything from Potions to Arithmancy. It was rather unexpected of him to outright ask for something, usually content to let Vita lead most conversations, and so Fausta had immediately agreed to take the tradition up at his asking. 

Thus, the spring of 1986, they had been woken earlier than normal by the main villa maids to get ready for their outing. The robes had been strange, as neither child was used to dressing to English wizarding norms; magical Italians were much more free with what they wore, more influenced by muggle fashion. Still, both child bore the heavy fabrics with an air of excitement. 

A sharp crack in the air, like a gunshot or a truck backfiring, signaled their mother’s return. 

“Mama!” Vita shouted, spinning on her heel towards the sound and racing down the front steps towards Fausta. 

Fausta caught her with strong arms when Vita threw herself towards the woman from the fifth to last step, spinning her daughter around in the air with laughter. “My beautiful little Vita! Look at you, all dressed up! You almost look like a proper Englishwoman!” Fausta peppered Vita’s face with kisses, causing the girl to giggle helplessly in her mother’s arms, a wide grin on both their faces. Then, her mother set the girl down and turned to the boy who waited three steps away with a quiet smile on his face. “My quiet Blaise, my lovely boy - come to mama, will you? She’s missed you terribly!”

Blaise was much more held-back in his affections, but he allowed his mother to kiss his face like she had Vita’s. “Hello, mother. How was your visit to to Germany?”

Fausta sighed as though she was a dying woman, reaching out to straighten some of Blaise’s hair, which the maids had slicked back with a bottle of Sleakeazy’s. “Nikolaus Wӓgner is as irritating as he is rich - of which he is luckily so. I don’t think I’ll keep him long.”

The blasé mention of her latest fly in the web floated past the twins with casual ease. Vita often thought she must have gone slightly crazy in death, to be able to brush the eventual murder of a man off so easily, but it was a boon to be able to. She might have gone truly crazy otherwise.

“Does he have a library?” Vita asked, curious. 

“He does,” Fausta smiled indulgently. “I’ve told him about your hunger for books, and he says he would love to meet you.”

Vita rolled her eyes. “I’m sure he would.”

Fausta laughed, and it was a cruel laugh. “Oh, my daughter, you really are mine. Alright, you two, we’ve got a big day ahead of us. Let’s get to it!”

The apparition to Charing Cross Road, London, England, was disconcerting and nausea-inducing. More so than a regular trip due to the distance, but Fausta had forced anti-nausea potions down their throats before leaving in case it was too much for the twins. Vita, who felt as though she might vomit anyways, thought it had been in vain. 

The anti-apparition wards around the Alley didn’t allow for direct transport to the shopping district. There was too much of a chance you could splinch into someone else, and there were documented incidents of such in some of the history books Vita had read, so there was an alleyway near the Muggle side of the Leaky Cauldron most magic folk used as an apparition point. 

The walk to the pub was fast, none of the muggles on the street looking twice at yet another strange group of people stepping out of the shadows. Vita assumed it was either a version of a Notice-Me-Not charm or simply the human mind learning to accept strange things as long as they had a pattern, like strange people walking around Charing Cross. 

Blaise, Vita noticed, seemed uninterested as ever in the going-on’s around him as they stepped into the pub. At least, outwardly, he did; Vita knew her brother practiced looking like a little aristocrat in the mirror, training his own reactions out of himself. She knew his tells, though, and felt him step closer to her slightly, nervous from the crowd. Vita reached out to grasp his hand, pulling him along behind her as she followed her mother. Blaise let her, keeping up with her easily. 

They stepped into the back alley behind the pub and Vita watched with fascination as Fausta made a show of opening up the brick wall. With every inch of light that broke through the shifting bricks her eyes grew wider and wider until they were the size of saucers.

“Awesome,” she whispered, squeezing Blaise’s hand. “Come on, mama! Let’s go, let’s go!”

 

\---

 

Notes:

 

  * Vita and Blaise were born on December 20th, 1979, and they got their wands when they were five. Vita's was of cedar wood stained a deep brown color, the heartstring of a Swedish Short-Snout dragon, and is 13 3/4" long, and rather bendy. Blaise's wand is of elm wood stained black, with the heartstring of the same Swedish Short-Snout that provided the heartstring in Vita's wand, and is 9 1/2" long, slightly supple.
    * Ollivander points out that dragon heartstring wands usually have dozens of siblings wands compared to unicorn hair wands or phoenix feather wands because the only way to get a dragon heartstring is for a dragon to die, so you can use the entire heart, compared to having to be gifted a unicorn hair or pheonix feather. Siblings suited to dragon heartstring wands usually end up with sibling wands.
  * The main home of the Zabini family is in Villa Carideo di Isola di Capri, or Villa Carideo of the Island Capri, in the gulf of Naples. It was built for Fausta by her first husband, Vittore di Napoli, in an unplottable piece of land that stretches for 32 acres (.05 square miles) hidden amongst the mountain range seperated Capri and Anacapri. Villa Carideo (as it is generally called in place of the full name) is staffed by Muggleborns and Squibs who have all undergone unbreakable vows to Fausta to not reveal the secrets of the Zabini family or of Villa Carideo, and to, as long as their contract stands, never knowingly harm a member of the Zabini family. They have five full-time, in-villa housekeepers, who each have four maids to oversee. There are three groundskeepers: one for the orchards, one for the vineyards, and one for the main grounds and gardens. There is one household manager, who has a personal assistant. There is also the Household Nanny, Harmonie Melba, who oversees Blaise and Vita's education and daily life. Both Blaise and Vita have personal assistants (who are also bodyguards) who travel with them in day-to-day life. 
  * Villa Carideo is based off Villa Antinori Di Monte Aguglioni in Florence, Italy, previously owned by the Monna Lisa’s family. 
  * Her first book heist is executed during a weekend stay at the Greengrass Manor in Ireland. The Lady Greengrass told her to read whatever she’d like in the library during her stay, so she proceeded to copy as many books as possible with the duplicating charm into her (charmed expanded) overnight bag. When she gets home after the weekend, she uses more stable enchantments to stop the deterioration of the copies.
  * She uses her friendly personality as an excuse to visit all her friends with libraries. By the time it’s time for her to go to Hogwarts, she’s ‘stolen’ (copied) nearly three hundred books. She hides them away in secret spots in the library, the least suspicious place for her to be seen carrying books, and the one place most the staff leave alone for her. 
  * The Sorting Hat puts her in Slytherin without a second thought. She’s slightly sad because she’d heard that Ravenclaw had a library in the tower. She vows to sneak into it. (Which she does. Multiple times. Their password is a riddle, hellooooooo? She’s learned that if she can defend her answer and convince the enchanted knocker, almost anything can be an answer.)
  * She and Blaise are at odds a lot of the time regarding things like bloodtraitors or the war. Vita lives by the philosophy that “neutrality in the face of evil is complacity” while Blaise lives by the philosophy of “I don’t want to die so I’m not getting involved.” 
  * HPatPS year: She doesn’t interact with the Trio because she’s a Slytherin and they’re Gryffindors and the trio is eleven/twelve and under the impression that all Slytherins are evil. When the troll invades the castle, she does not go to save Granger because she’s not friends with Granger and didn’t even know Granger was in danger. She finished her year out normally with above average grades, pissed off about Dumbledore’s favoritism, with a small portion of the Hogwarts library stolen. 
  * The summer of 1992 she runs into Granger in France, where’s she’s escaped to for the day out of boredom. (Harmonie will be pissed off when she gets back.) She interacts politely with them at first, introducing herself as a classmate to Granger’s parents, who fuck up her plan to leave fast by assuming she’s a friend of Granger’s and dragging her along for the day with them. It’s awkward all around, but by the end of it she and Granger are much less hostile towards each other. (Granger realized that she can’t judge every Slytherin based on Draco Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson, and Vita thinks Granger can be nice when she’s not lecturing you in class.) Throughout the summer, Vita continues to visit her friends to steal from them. 
  * HPatCoS: She runs into Granger on the train, who is worried about Potter and Weasley #6 not being on the train, and makes the girl take a breather by letting her sit in her compartment with Blaise, who is comically horrified (but on the inside just annoyed) at the the bushy haired girl in their compartment. She endears herself further to Granger by handing her a book on advanced magical theory the girl hadn’t read. When, on Halloween, the Chamber opens, Vita is terrified that Slytherin’s monster will be able to tell she was once a Muggle. She confesses this to Blaise, who takes it in stride - by gluing their hands together, which takes hours in the Infirmary to undo, and then by simply following his sister everywhere in an effort to protect her. (This is how he finds out about the book stealing, which he is horrified by at first because he’s been raised with no other ideals than that knowledge within the family is practically sacred, but after a few weeks of fighting he gets over it.) She starts practicing Occlumency with Blaise. When Harry Potter is vilified by the school as the heir of Slytherin, she decides to follow Granger’s example (because to her, Granger seems to have a lot of common sense compared to magical folk, and thus when she doesn’t know what to do in regards to a magical situation, she follows Granger’s cue (or Blaise’s if he gets the chance to react first in front of her.)) and doesn’t believe any of it. When Granger gets petrified, she visits her whenever she thinks she won’t be seen, and is thankful that Potter kills the monster later that year. (She also gives Granger a copy of all her notes that Granger missed, which is met with tears and a tight hug, to Vita’s surprise and slight discomfort.)
  * Summer of 1993: Sirius Black has escaped from Azkaban, but that’s not really something Vita is focused on. She owls back and forth with Granger more so than any of her ‘friends’ (aka, book hoarders she’s stealing from). Granger finds out that purebloods (who aren’t ‘bloodtraitors’ who adopted the practice of respecting the Trace) have a way to get rid of the Trace every summer rather than let the charms build upon each other [My theory is that every wand when sold from Ollivanders has no Trace on it, and that the spell is cast on the wands of students leaving school, but that most Pureblood families have ways passed down to get rid of it every year. My theory with the Trace is that the charm is weak when first cast, which is why Dobby doing magic in the same house as Harry was able to set it off, because when its weak it doesn’t connect to the magical signature of the castor as easily, but every time it’s cast on the wand the charm gets stronger, so by fifth year a person would only get a letter if they were the person to cast a spell, not if the person two seats away at their dinner table did.] and demands it be done for her wand, to Vita’s amusement. She invites Granger over to Villa Carideo for two weeks during the summer and undo’s the trace then. Granger loves the Zabini Library. When Granger goes to stay in the Leaky Cauldron with the Weasleys and Potter, Vita makes a point to go visit and drag Blaise along with her. At first, only Granger interacts with them without suspicion - even the adults. It pisses Vita off to no end that even adults would judge a child based on their House, but eventually they all settle down, kinda. Enough that they could eat at the same table civilly, at least, and for Ron to stop saying shit like Slimy Slytherins aloud instead of in his head. 
  * HPatPoA: the Dementors affect Vita like no other, because every time they come close, she’s reliving the worst experiences of her life, aka, her death. It feels like she’s died every time one comes too close, and the flashbacks are terrible. She died in a horrific plane accident, too, which only makes it worse. (Side note: Vita doesn’t like heights. She forces herself to use brooms, though, because _magic broomsticks_ , helloooooo?) She is the person to unfortunately tell Harry that Black is his godfather, because she interacts with the trio more this year and has all the pureblood gossip that Ron, as a Weasley, doesn’t. She, like Hermione, takes as many classes as possible. Dumbledore initially wanted to block her getting a Time Turner (not that Vita knew this), because she’s a scary smart Slytherin with, to what seems like to the outside eye, an insatiable hunger for magical power. Kinda like a certain Dark Lord when he was their age. So he’s like, “idk man, maybe she shouldn’t get a device that holds power over time.” But McGonagall (surprise!) is the first to be like “yeah, no, you’re wrong.” and does it anyways. [I don’t pick Snape to be the first because Snape has shown himself to be nothing but a jackass to little kids, and, in my opinion, probably wouldn’t initially stick up for the kid. He might do it after seeing McGonagall, because then he’d be like “wait. Yeaaaaah. She _does_ deserve a time turner if a little gryffindor is getting one too!” but he wouldn’t do it out of the kindness of his heart.] Unlike Hermione, who uses it strictly as told, Vita uses it left and right to do shit. Don’t want to go to class? It can wait a couple of hours, I gotta finish stealing books! Need to eat multiple dinners, study in a place she won’t run into herself, or just take a nap? She’s set up spots around the castle where, depending on the placement of certain objects outside the vicinity, she’ll know if a future self/past self is already in there and won’t cause a paradox! She also starts learning the Patronus charm, but in secret because she doesn’t realize Potter is getting lessons from Lupin that she could then demand to have as well to diminish the idea that Lupin is practicing favoritism. Also, yes, she knows he’s a werewolf. There’s dozens working on the orchards at home, all of whom she’s friends with because she’s made it a point to make sure her mom doesn’t accidentally become a slaver with the staff. She can recognize a werewolf. So does Blaise. Neither of them give a shit. Buckbeak doesn’t even have to get a trial because as soon as Vita gets wind of it from Hermione (and Malfoy, who boasts about it in the Common Room) she’s owling her mother to take the hippogriff in to their stables at Villa Carideo. Hagrid cries when he tells her his friend won’t get decapitated, and that he’s welcome to come visit during the summer as long as he owls ahead so she can help him find the Villa. The day comes when the handlers come to pick Buckbeak up, but when Vita leads them to Hagrid’s, Buckbeak is missing. Over the course of the next few hours, she’s very confused, and is, coincidentally, in the Infirmary when the trio and Snape and Black are brought in. She’s roped into Harry and Hermione’s time adventure, is told that Black is innocent (which, when coming from Hermione’s mouth, Vita doesn’t hesitate to believe, to both Hermione and Harry’s shock.) Since they’ve got time before they’ve got to find Black, Vita convinces them to go watch Hagrid’s because she wants to know what happened to Buckbeak. They then warn the trio, who were visiting Hagrid when they should’ve been in class, thus the hiding, when the handlers and Vita start coming. But then Vita’s like, wait, Buckbeak hasn’t disappeared. But I can see myself about to come- oh great, I’m stealing Buckbeak. So she steals Buckbeak, and doesn’t really know why. They then go to see what Harry believes to be his parents saving his and Black’s life, but in reality is Vita and Harry’s patroni. (Vita’s is a magpie that attacks the dementors like it’s swooping season in australia) Then they break out Sirius like Dumbledore originally implied to do, and Vita realizes she can send Sirius to the villa but that since it’s unplottable, Buckbeak won’t be able to find it, nor Sirius, so she goes with them. Hermione and Harry are against the idea, but Vita reminds Hermione that she also has a Time Turner and that she’ll see her the next morning at breakfast like usual. It takes them, going at Buckbeak’s top speed with very few breaks, nearly eleven hours to get to the Villa. She finds her mother in the gardens and convinces her that Black is innocent and to let him stay. None of the staff can break their vows to snitch if Fausta declares it to the staff as a Zabini secret, and Fausta relents on the fact that Sirius is to be confined to the main house and the gardens, not allowed to venture further. Her mother apparates her back to Hogsmeade, where she uses a broom and her time turner to go back to the hours before breakfast and sneak back into the school. Hermione finds her the next morning to ask if it went alright - it did - and to tell her that Lupin was resigning before he could be fired on basis of being a werewolf. Which, like most things, pisses Vita off. She owls her mother to beg (Fausta is slightly annoyed with her with all these requests, but also doesn’t have the heart to say no to her only daughter when she’s only trying to do good in the world.) for Lupin to be offered the position of a part-time, in-home housekeeper at the villa. Lupin, who was told by Harry that Sirius was given sanctuary at the Zabini’s, (which, when Vita finds out, will piss her off because he can’t go telling people!) takes the offer instantly. 
  * Summer of 1994: hanging out with Sirius and Remus, stealing books from people, getting into trouble in Capri with Blaise, and, then, the World Cup. Quuiditch is the only sport Vita has ever cared about, of course she makes her mom buy them tickets at the top box. She brings enchanted glasses that show what she sees on a mirror with her so that Sirius and Remus don’t get left out, and is excited to see Hermione, Harry, and the Weasleys. Malfoy, not so much. She’d dedicated days within a night once earlier that summer at a pureblood sleepover at the Malfoy’s to stealing their entire library using her time turner so that she’d never have to go back to his manor. She slept for three days afterwards when they got home, having abused invigoration potions to get through the night. Of course, when Death Eaters attack everything turns into chaos, and she feels lucky she didn’t have her glasses on because she’s not sure Sirius would be able to hold back from running to stop them. She owls Hermione after to check that she was okay, to her relief they all were.
  * HPatGoF: She knows about the Triwizard Tournament through her mom, and has already resolved that she doesn’t give a fuck about it. She continues last years habit of taking multiple classes, and no teacher seems to mention the fact that she should have turned in the time turner the year before. No one mentions it to Hermione either, who she knows still has hers. When Halloween comes, and Durmstrang and Beauxbatons come, she still doesn’t care. By now she’s amassed over two thousand books that she’s stolen. She’s been slowly siphoning money from her trust vault into a separate, personal vault that her mom can’t touch, and uses the money to buy an abandoned cathedral before the school year starts: this is where she’ll build her library. The cathedral is in Florence, Italy, and she has it warded up. She is one of the few, along with Hermione and Blaise, to believe Harry didn’t put his name in the Goblet. The strife between he and Ron, and Hermione’s strained relationship with the both of them because of it, causes Harry to gravitate towards the two Zabini’s simply because they’re the only other friendly people, which helps grow their friendship. She helps him practice magic for the first task, and is slightly cold towards Ron for a few weeks after he and Harry make up. When the Yule ball is announced, she originally doesn’t plan to go. There’s no girl that she wants to go with in the school, seeing as she feels kinda gross with the idea of dating a girl her physical age when she feels mentally older. She supports Hermione on having a date and not wanting to disclose the identity of him, because she trusts Hermione, and thinks Ron is a jackass for being so rude to Hermione and saying she was making her date up. When Ron then asks her, then, to go with her instead of Hermione, she tells him no and then explains that she’s gay. She then says that if he and Harry are so desperate for a date, why not go together? The Wizarding World has much different views on same sex relationships than the muggle one due to magical advancements in procreation. They take her advice, realizing it was true, and go together, to the Weasley twin’s catcalls. She spends the ball up in Ravenclaw tower, quietly copying books while a girl named Luna reads in a corner. She likes Luna, and befriends the girl. When the fourth task happens, and Voldemort is resurrected and Cedric is dead, she realizes that she’s going to have to wait a little longer to open her library to the public. 
  * Summer of 1995: Hermione seeks out Vita at the villa, seeking advice. She’s scared for her parents, knowing what happened to the Muggles at the World Cup last year, knowing that the war is coming back and she’ll be right at the center as Harry’s friend. Vita, who hasn’t got as much common sense as she thinks, thinks the best idea is to erase her parents’ memories and send them away for their safety. (She and Hermione are more similar than they think.) She does it for Hermione, sending them to Canada. She convinces her mom to let Hermione move in, (Fausta is realizing that the Zabini reputation for war neutrality is about to end as she takes in even more strays) and Dumbledore finds them during a day out in Capri to ask Hermione to come to stay with the Order of the Phoenix at the Weasleys (Dumbledore hasn’t had contact with Sirius and Remus like in canon bc they’re not on the run and are on unplottable land so they can’t be tracked down. So instead of the Order HQ being Grimmauld Place, they but up a Fidelius at the Burrow and set up there. Dumbledore, who has slowly come to the idea that Vita isn’t Tom Riddle 2.0, suggests Vita (and Blaise, by association bc Vita isn’t going anywhere without him, not that Dumbledore realizes this until Blaise is also at HQ) can come too, and also to pass on the invitation to Sirius and Remus. Hermione goes to stay with them, and Vita comes to visit (with Blaise) whenever Remus and Sirius go for Order Meetings. Vita doesn’t give a shit about Dumbledore’s rules about not owling Harry information and just. Fucking. Shows up at Private Drive one day. Like hey, Harry, Dumbledore says I can’t owl you so I thought I’d just come in person. How’s it going? So yeah. Then the Dementor shit happens and Harry is nearly expelled, and though Vita assures him that if he were actually expelled she would sneak him into the villa and set him up with private tutors and a new wand, his spirits aren’t raised much. This is the summer Fausta teaches Blaise and Vita to apparate illegally. Vita has her library set up and keeps filling it - avoiding the homes of Voldemort-associated families when she steals - throughout the summer. 
  * HPatOotP: Umbridge is a fucking bitch. The moment she finds out the chick is using blood quills she snitches to her mom, who throws the biggest hissy fit and uses all her connections to get the woman out of Hogwarts. When the Board tries to keep Umbridge by saying they don’t have a replacement, Fausta offers herself. She’s got the education for it, after all, as she’d spent her youth before her first marriage making a name for herself as a world traveler getting into trouble wherever she went, and got O’s on her DADA NEWT’s. So, to the students, it seems almost overnight that Umbridge is thrown out of Hogwarts during the winter holidays and Professor Zabini takes her place. The D.A. stays a club but since they don’t have a teacher sponsor (and who would sponsor Harry Potter’s club in this political climate? The Ministry has started sending auditors to make up for Umbridge’s loss) they stay secret. Marietta Edgecombe doesn’t have the chance to snitch so they aren’t caught. Blaise and Vita are, at first, the only Slytherins in the group, before they start bringing in the muggleborns and halfbloods that are in Slytherin and refuse to discriminate or tolerate discrimination against their House. Tracey Davis is one of the first. When Voldemort starts sending Harry visions, and Mr Weasley nearly dies, and Snape gives shit lessons, Blaise takes it upon himself to teach Harry Occlumency the same way he did Vita (mentioned before that he “trained his reactions away” aka he was learning occlumency secretly when he was six, lmao). Still, one slips through that Sirius was captured. They go to Fausta first, to find out if Sirius was still at the villa, but according to the housekeeper who she asked he’d been out all day. Harry confesses what his visions were and his fears, and Fausta takes it upon herself to go to Dumbledore. Unfortunately, Harry gets another vision while she’s gone and decides to go after Sirius himself. There were different people this time with him because they didn’t need to have Umbridge tricked away, thus the people who head to the Ministry to break in are: Harry, Hermione, Ron, Vita, Blaise, and Luna (who was with the thestrals and refused to be left behind). Sirius dies. Voldemort is revealed. Vita kills Bellatrix Lestrange. (she’s been reading books and books on magic since she could turn a page, and she’s got the creativity to use even a simple Wingardium Leviosa to kill. While she’s distracted, cackling about the fight between Voldemort-Harry-Dumbledore, Vita kills her by using a simple gluing charm and gluing her esophagus shut. She dies of asphyxiation, though she throws a nonverbal curse at Vita before she dies that hits her and rips her intestines out. She barely survives. 
  * Summer of 1996: Hermione stays at the villa for half the summer, with the Weasleys the other half. The Battle of Seven Potters, but with the Zabini family as well, as Fausta has joined the Order and refused to not give information to the children who are at the center of the fight no matter what the adults do, so Molly Weasley really doesn’t like her. She didn’t like her before, anyways, when Fausta was simply the Black Widow Witch. Vita is bedridden most of the summer, and because Remus is still at the villa too, he’s usually with her. Which means, when Tonks comes to visit him, she visits Vita by default. They grow to be friends. She’s the maid of honor AND best man for their impromptu wedding in Capri, which she gets out of bed for. George loses his ear, Mad-Eye dies, blah blah blah. Vita meets Andromeda Tonks, sister to Bellatrix, who she killed; Andromeda doesn’t hold it against her. (Earlier in the summer, Harry finds out Sirius made him his heir, and that he’s got some sort of house called Grimmauld Number 12 in London and a House Elf who hates everyone. Nobody suggests using it for an Order HQ because it never came up before and now that Sirius is dead and Harry’s grieving, Dumbledore doesn’t even think to ask.)
  * HPatHBP: Slughorn is Potions Professor, Snape is DADA’s because Fausta quit because she discovered she hated teaching. Why are all children but her own idiots? Fausta doesn’t know. Anyways, Harry still finds the Potion’s book and then Hermione and Vita have their first fight. They disagree on what Harry is doing; to Hermione, it is cheating, but to Vita, it is taking advantage of all his resources available and commendable. They don’t speak to each other for weeks before calling a truce between each other to simply not talk about the book. Vita doesn’t know if she can tell Hermione about her library, and that hurts her, because Hermione is one of her closest friends. She does convince Harry to let her copy the book so she can study it. She finds the book fascinating, but also knows most of what was changed to the potions in the book already due to private tutors as a child and her mass amount of book knowledge that supports all the notes in the book. Harry, obsessed with Draco, gets a knock upside the head by Vita who thinks he’s going through a gay crisis. And if he wasn’t then, he is now. (When Harry examines his feelings, he realizes he’s bisexual...and is in love with…both Hermione and Ron...cue the angst.) Then Dumbledore dies as Death Eaters invade the castle, Vita and Blaise fight to protect the castle alongside the DA and order. Harry shows them all the fake locket, and Vita (who has practically memorized genealogies about Wizarding families, knows the gossip about who was on what side of the war, and spent her summers hanging out with Sirius and learning about his life) knows instantly who R.A.B. is. Harry tries to say that Hermione, Ron, Vita, and Blaise shouldn’t come with him on the Horcrux hunt, but they’re all pretty quick to be like “Nah bro u stuck with us” and Hermione steals books from Dumbledore’s office! Vita is so proud. 
  * Summer of 1997/Deathly Hallows: at the villa, with Ron visiting frequently and using mirrors to connect to Harry, they plan their hunt. They’ll head to Grimmauld Place to find the real locket, and then head back to the villa and figure it out from there. Fausta hasn’t had a new husband or lover in months, too busy with the Order. When Harry goes to the Burrow, along with Hermione to help prepare for the Bill/Fleur wedding, Molly does her best to discourage any secret talking - she’s not an idiot, she knows they’re up to something - but Fausta covers for them (she lived through one war by ignoring those trying to make her pick a side, she won’t let her kids’ choice be taken from them by even a well-meaning helicopter mom). When the wedding is attacked, the five disappear to London and find Grimmauld Place. They convince Kreacher, who’s practically mad because he’s been alone in a house with Walburga Black’s portrait for years, that they’re there to destroy the locket. Kreacher, who is convinced this is his last chance to serve Master Regulus, gives them the Locket. And then abruptly dies. House Elves, after all, need family magic to survive. Though Harry inherited him, he never bonded to the Elf, and thus far Kreacher had been surviving on pure spite. He dies in peace knowing he finished the task set out for him by Master Regulus. They stay at Grimmauld Place, occasionally getting attacked by doxies or boggarts or yelled at by Walburga’s portrait, while they try to figure out where to go next. Fausta sent a patronus saying not to come home, that the Ministry was searching the Villa for them illegally. Vita discovers the library and fangirls over it for hours, and Harry just fucking. Doesn’t care. His friend likes the library more than him? More than Hermione? She can have it then. It’s a touching moment for Vita, if not for Harry. They take turns wearing the Locket, and Vita reacts nearly as badly as Harry - she does, after all, have a lifetime’s worth of mistakes and regrets and shame for the Locket to feed off of. She and Blaise start sharing a bed like when they were kids, because she starts having nightmares. Harry is dancing around his feelings for Hermione and Ron while Hermione dances around her feelings for Harry and Ron, and Ron dances around his feelings for Hermione while he’s so oblivious to the idea of being gay that he mistakes his feelings for Harry as jealousy. Blaise is the first to notice it and tells Vita, and they make bets on when they’ll get their shit together. Then they find out about Snatchers while out and about and have to apparate away after fighting, and they make use of Hermione’s emergency bag, unable to return to Grimmauld now that the Snatchers know they were in the vicinity, if not the actual place. They don’t starve because Vita isn’t an idiot and remembers watching Naked and Afraid a lot as a Muggle, and just applies those ideas with magic. They need food? Accio fish, bitch. Sometimes it ends up with her being covered in a pile of fish, sometimes not, but it works. Ron storms off, and everyone suffers for the extra time with the Locket. Vita, pained by the angst and sadness, pushes at Hermione to tell Harry about her feelings so that they at least would have each other. Hermione and Harry commiserate over their feelings for Ron, the idiot, but take comfort in each other. They visit Godric’s Hollow, and when Nagini attacks, breaking Harry’s wand as well as Blaise’s, Vita uses fiendfyre on impulse - burning Nagini and the house to the ground, getting the attention of muggles though she was able to control the spell enough to end it, but passes out for the effort. She wakes up back in the tent, everyone is in a bad mood. Then a few hours later Harry has a vision about Voldemort being pissed because Nagini was apparently a Horcrux, so their spirits are slightly raised. Unfortunately they can’t use fiendfyre on the Locket - not yet, not until Vita is back to full strength because she’s the only one with barely enough control to use the spell. Then, Harry follows a stag and finds the Sword of Gryffindor and Ron saves his life and the locket shows him Harry and Hermione making out, yes, but also talking about how much they hated Ron. Ron destroys the Horcrux, and Harry kisses him out of exhilaration, to Ron’s befuddled enthusiastic consent. They return to camp and Hermione gets mad but in the end the three sleep in the same bed and take comfort in their tangle of limbs and sheets. Blaise owes Vita money because she bet him they would all get together before the war was out, while he thought they wouldn’t. THen they get caught by snatchers at Xenophilius Lovegood’s and it’s not Hermione they take to torture, because Bellatrix isn’t there to be like “oooh, mudblood!”. Instead, there is Narcissa, grieving the loss of her sister, and Rodolphus, grieving his wife, faced with the teenage killer of her. They take delight in her revenge, and Draco watches in horror as Vita is carved up and tortured with Crucio. The word bloodtraitor is carved into her stomach. Dobby rescues them all to the Cottage, but there’s no Bellatrix to throw knives, thus he lives to see another day. During her torture, Blaise was freaking the fuck out in the basement hearing his sister’s screams, though the trio were close to the same level. They gather from Voldemort’s mind visions that there’s a Horcrux hidden in the Lestrange vault, and hey, what do you know, Rodolphus is missing a handful of hair that Vita snatched whilst fighting back during the torture. Blaise is the one to transform into Rodolphus to get into the vault, though he is loathe to do so, and the rest simply transform into randoms to follow and steal from Gringott’s. They destroy the locket right after they escape - Vita does, that is, as offered by Harry because he thinks its good revenge. There is only one horcrux left (according to Dumbledore’s information, which they don’t know isn’t true) and they make plans to go to Hogwarts because that’s the most important place to Voldemort, right? So they do, and find that the D.A. has been smuggling muggleborns and half bloods and anyone targeted by the Carrows into the RoR - including Slytherins! The battle happens, Slytherins stay to fight for hogwarts, and people die. Who, you ask? Colin Creevey, Lavender Brown, and Fred Weasley - and Fausta, but not Remus and Tonks, because you know Vita saw them and followed them in the nick of time. Hermione and Ron destroy the diadem. Then Harry dies and comes back to life, Neville stands up to Voldemort himself (raising his wand against the Dark Lord, because there’s no snake to kill but the biggest snake himself). Voldemort and Harry duel, Voldemort dies. The war is over. 
  * Epilogue-ish: Vita goes back to Hogwarts with Hermione and Blaise, finished her stealing of books as well as making copies of the Black Library, and opens up the Zabini Public Library of Magic. Hermione, Ron, and Harry get poly hitched, and Ginny and Blaise fall in love unexpectedly. Vita doesn’t get married, she lives out her life as a librarian and world traveler like her mom before her. 



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the culmination of a day of writing nonstop until now, 4:40ish am. it's rushed and dumb and i really don't care. I saw Ocean's 8 yesterday afternoon and i wanted to write about a thief and then she just ended up stealing books and becoming a librarian. I feel like this is something I write about a lot, characters becoming librarians. I like libraries, can you tell. Comment if you want, I know I'm supposed to be working on "sepia toned" but tbh I haven't even started the fourth chapter....

**Author's Note:**

> I've updated this to include what little I wrote of a continuation. Comments are greatly appreciated.


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